Talk On The Inner Well

This is a talk based on Jesus' interaction with the woman at the well in John 4. The talk explores the Divine Indwelling as the source of living water that wells up from within our inner being. This talk can be followed by the guided meditation track "The Inner Well".

Transcript

Today I want to draw on the image of the well as a symbol of our inner journey and we'll also explore the symbol of the living water that Jesus spoke about.

In describing the inner journey I want to start with a quote from the German mystic Meister Eckhart who wrote,

I am sure as a fact of my very life that nothing is so close to me as God is close to me.

God is closer to me than I am even to my own self.

My very existence and being depends upon the fact that God is with me and is present.

God is closer to me than I am even to my own self.

What a statement.

And the sense of God being nearer to us than we are to ourselves is described in 1 Corinthians 3 verse 16,

Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and God's spirit dwells within you.

The Quaker George Fox stated this emphatically,

The measure is within and the light of God is within and the pearl is within you which is hid and the word of God is within you and you are the temples of God.

This gives a sense of the location of God's sanctuary,

God's dwelling place.

It is within me,

Within you.

The holy of holies is within.

As Colossians 1 verse 27 puts it,

Christ in you,

The hope of glory,

The hope of radiance,

The hope of overflowing with the abundance of what this means.

Do we really take this in?

That within us at the root of our being is the very source of all creation,

The source of living water.

The richness of the wellspring of life is within us,

With the possibility of our lives overflowing with the freedom and abundance and fullness of what this could mean.

But if we look at how we configure our lives,

The tight self-protective way in which we go about our daily activities,

We have to acknowledge that mostly in our society we remain ignorant of this and in our typical way in which we even live our Christian lives,

We remain ignorant of this.

Eti Hillesum,

A Jewish mystic,

Used the image of a well to describe this inner dwelling place of God.

I do quote this often,

So apologies to those who have heard me quote this previously many times,

But I found this a really beautiful description.

She wrote,

There's a really deep well inside me and in it dwells God.

Sometimes I'm there too,

But more often stones and grit block the well and God is buried beneath.

Then he must be dug out again.

And this analogy describes very well why we are so ignorant of this inner sanctuary.

Because the entrance to the well is clogged by layers of the grit and stones.

And this debris that blocks the well is so normalized that we don't even know that there is a well buried beneath it.

That the source of living water dwells deep within our inner beings.

We're ignorant of this.

We've forgotten that God,

Our source of living water,

Actually dwells within us in the quiet inner places of our beings.

Or we've been taught to not trust the source,

But to depend on the small cupfuls of water being handed out by others.

So we keep searching all around us trying to find this living water out there.

And we do stumble across water that slakes are thirst from time to time.

But we soon find ourselves thirsting again.

Which is so beautifully portrayed in this story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman.

Mostly we do not know experientially this water that will keep us from ever thirsting again.

The water that Jesus promised that will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

This should be experiential knowledge of this.

And so the journey that beckons to us if we are to discover this living water is the inner journey.

An unblocking of this well to discover the living source within.

Guard the ground of our being.

Or in this analogy of living water,

Guard the groundwater of our being.

So in this inner journey of this unblocking of the well,

We begin with starting to recognize the grit and stones that block this well.

And partly this is caused by the noise and clutter of our modern lives keeping us so busy that we skate across the surface of our lives hardly ever slowing down long enough to sink into the moment very deeply.

We are very unfamiliar with simply being.

Sometimes when we are on holiday we touch on a sense of contentment and well being that is surprising in its joyful simplicity.

And this is because we are living at a different pace and we are free from the usual daily head noise that clutters up our minds.

And for a while the opening is cleared to the bubbling waters of simply living.

The simple joy and aliveness that is there within us,

Just usually buried over.

But this doesn't last long.

Even if we buy the plot of land that we holidayed at,

Which many of us are tempted to do at the time,

Thinking this is it.

But we cannot control or own this source of vitality.

This is just so important for us to get hold of.

As soon as we try to grasp it,

Control it,

We find ourselves clutching at a handful of dry sand.

Because that's just the ego trying to get involved,

Control,

Own,

Make it last.

That's what the ego does.

The clogging of the inner well also results from the ongoing fantasy world of the mind that we live in,

With its incessant narrative and versioning that keeps us caught in the fictional character of me.

I won't go into this too much in detail today because I have talked about this in some of my other talks,

And in particular in the first talk in the inner freedom series,

Where we explored the way our thoughts can keep us caught in a negative virtual reality.

And you can find that talk on this web page if you look through the side menu on resources.

But this clutter in our minds keeps us from the simplicity of being that allows this natural bubbling up of the water of life.

And even our concepts of God can form part of the blockage that covers over this well if we remain at the conceptual level of trying to understand and grasp.

Acquiring mere ideas just adds more layers of clutter.

And so we begin with recognizing what is happening in our minds,

And then choosing to gently let this go,

Allowing ourselves to rest at a deeper level of our beings.

In a sense excavating the opening to the well and descending into its depths.

We do this by again and again returning to the simplicity of presence,

In quietness and trust.

And I love that Isaiah 30 verse 15 passage which describes,

In repentance or returning and rest is your salvation,

In quietness and trust is your strength.

Because these take us deeper into this well of our inner being,

The well in which dwells guard the groundwater of our being.

This is where the choice to practice contemplative prayer is so important.

Cynthia Bourgeaux wrote,

The divine indwelling is the cornerstone of contemplative prayer.

It reveals the source of our own being,

The explosion of divine love into form which first gave rise to our personal life.

It also reveals the direction in which our hearts must travel for a constant renewed intimacy with this source.

As we enter contemplative prayer we draw near the wellspring from which our being flows.

That's a lovely way of inviting us into contemplative prayer.

As we enter contemplative prayer we draw near the wellspring from which our being flows.

Now I need to say again that it is so easy for us to stay at the level of thinking about God and even about this inner well,

About contemplation,

Thinking about presence,

All of that.

Believe me,

I have done it a lot.

And this can just keep the well blocked with the grit and stones of ideas and concepts if it doesn't translate into inner experience and heart opening,

Surrender.

We also cannot build structures or develop formulae to make this living water flow.

This is not how it happens.

We humans are so bent on achieving and problem solving but all of this self-initiated activity simply blocks the opening.

When we begin to trust our structures rather than the source we find ourselves thirsting again as our well lies neglected and forgotten.

This image of the blocked well can be a bit misleading.

We need to keep in mind the limitations of analogies because we tend to think that to excavate the well we have to sweat and toil as we dig out the opening.

And it's not that kind of digging involving our problem solving act of let me get this right let me fix this kind of way of being.

The inner movement involves more of a recognition of where our minds have got caught.

This is the kind of excavation that happens.

And a gentle release of letting go and returning to being simply present.

And this gentle release of letting go is an inner movement of falling into the grace of the already present one.

The one we've been assured is dwelling within us.

And it actually feels like a downward movement into our inner being into this inner well because we are moving from the level of entanglement in the mind to a deeper quieter non-conceptual way of being in God.

I've recently been reading the Gospel of Thomas and have found the commentary on this Gospel by Jean-Yves Le Lou extremely helpful.

And in this Gospel in Logian 74 Jesus said there are many who stand around the well but no one to go down into it.

There are many who stand around the well but no one to go down into it.

And this commentator Le Lou wrote indeed many people hang about staring into the well speaking of its springs imagining how its waters taste but words do nothing for their thirst.

There are very few who are prepared to descend or to dig.

Yet as Meister Eckhart often reminds us the spring is always there.

In order to drink from it we must forget all our talk about it from the time when we were bystanders and be prepared to descend into the depths of our earth and clear away the excess dirt so that it can gush forth and fill the well.

And this is what the contemplative life the inner journey beckons us to.

To have times where we make a conscious choice to pause from all our doing,

Busyness and ordinary thinking so that we can clear the opening of this well of God's presence within our own lives.

Not spending all our time talking or theorizing about it but actually being prepared to descend into the depths of our earth as Le Lou puts it and clear away the excess dirt so that it can gush forth and fill the well with the streams of living water that Jesus promised will flow within us.

I like the description given in my Greek ep in the translation about the well.

It describes it as the idea of gushing plumply.

I love that gushing plumply.

This is a wonderful description of the generosity and abundance of God our inner source.

We're so used to a scarcity economy counting the income and the outflow for fear of running low but the abundance from the inner source is all about giving allowing a generous outflow but from this source because these living waters never stop flowing.

They arise from the source of creation from the source of all life.

That's the potential.

However because we've mostly overlooked these quiet inner depths it takes some stilling and attuning to begin to recognize this divine indwelling presence.

We have to learn to listen in a way that we're generally not taught on an inner level listening in and to the subtle stirrings of silence and love.

And again to quote Eti Hillesum I listen to myself allow myself to be led not by anything on the outside but by what wells up from within.

What wells up from within.

And Sinteres of Avila wrote that those who are able to practice the what she called the prayer of recollection will receive the water of the fountain and what she means by the prayer of recollection is prayer centered upon awareness of the presence of God within ourselves.

She wrote it is called recollection because the soul collects together all the faculties and enters within itself to be with its God.

Its divine master comes more speedily to teach it and grant it the prayer of quiet.

This inner journey also requires humility and a deep trust.

All we can really do is to allow ourselves to be laid bare knowing our utter poverty and inability to make the flow happen that is so not in our hands.

Choosing instead the attitude of surrender.

Master Eckhart expressed it in his German language as Gellassenheit meaning a kind of tranquil surrender or resigned humility.

A necessary humbling of the over controlling meddling ego where we choose instead to remain an empty waiting which itself is a kind of spiritual awareness that allows the source to flow through the simple bare opening.

And a phrase by the German mystic Jacob Bermer that has become a kind of a guiding mantra for me has been may my soul remain in resigned humility as a fountain relies on its source.

May my soul remain in resigned humility as a fountain relies on its source.

Now here I just want to switch gears a little bit and talk about one of the key fears that we face on this inner journey and that is the fear of aloneness.

The fear that all we will find when we take the journey within is a lonely dry barrenness.

And in the setting of this story of the Samaritan woman at the well is an interesting contrast between her aloneness in the dry noonday heat as she approached the well and the living water that Jesus described with the sense of the cool refreshing depths of the inner well that this evokes.

And I've personally experienced this fear of aloneness and inner barrenness.

At the start of my contemplative journey my own company used to feel like a dry well of abandonment and I was scared of the silence and of my own aloneness.

It raised in me my deep sense of insecurity and fear of rejection and also fears of nothing happening leaving me with a sense of abandonment by God.

I also feared being at the mercy of whatever difficult emotions arose without my usual distractions to run to and escape to.

I had no idea of what a rich inner well there can be within.

And Martin Laird described very clearly why silence and solitude can feel so threatening.

He wrote,

Silence lays bare this wound that seems to be with us for life and brings us face to face,

Eye to eye with what feels like nothing at all.

In this spaciousness we wash in the lover's well and discover that what may strike the senses as nothing at all is paradoxically an overflowing fullness,

An emptiness ever thronging.

Silence alone will lead us to this discovery.

And so in my own personal journey through practicing silence and solitude on retreats and also in my own daily prayer times,

Learning some tools of being with difficult emotions and learning to trust the feeling of lostness,

Of silence.

With time I have found that I acclimatize to the rhythms of silence and solitude,

Lostness and foundness.

And I have found that a remarkable shift has taken place where I have discovered the delicious contentment and fulfillment of being in my own company,

Which I have discovered is the never absent companionship of God.

There's always a fullness of that that is possible when we allow ourselves to start to ease into this rhythm of silence and solitude.

And this has opened me to the wonder of belovedness,

Which has to be an experiential encounter with our belovedness in God.

John O'Donohue wrote beautifully on the relationship between aloneness and belonging.

He wrote,

Each one of us is alone in the world.

It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness.

Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you.

Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness,

The lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging with which you will only become empty and weary.

When you face your aloneness,

Something begins to happen.

Gradually,

The sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging.

This is a slow and open-ended transition,

But it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality.

He goes on to say,

In a sense,

This is the endless task of finding your true home within your life.

It is not narcissistic,

For as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart,

Doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world.

No longer on the run from your aloneness,

Your connections with others become real and creative.

You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside of yourself.

This is slow work.

It takes years to bring your mind home.

And Elizabeth Gilbert echoed this in a lovely reflection that she wrote after spending 17 days on her own in the west coast of India,

And interestingly she,

At the beginning of her own spiritual adventures,

Used to absolutely fear rejection,

Abandonment and aloneness.

And after these 17 days of solitude,

She wrote,

How little I understood back then what a furnace of creativity aloneness can be,

And what quiet delights a woman can discover when she is left to explore her own company.

I also didn't know back then that we are never really alone.

There is spirit,

Which never feels closer to me than when I am in solitude.

I did not very often feel alone out there.

Instead I felt held,

Met,

Recognised.

The older I get,

The more greedy I become for my own stillness.

So that is what I really want to say.

It's okay to be greedy for your own stillness.

In that stillness,

If you listen carefully,

You just might hear the work that is longing to be created within you.

A beautiful description of the source of creativity and life,

Longing to be met within us,

As we entrust ourselves.

When we dare to trust going down into the inner will,

Our lonely dry will of abandonment is transformed into a flourishing,

Rich,

Deeply fulfilling,

Creative and overflowing well of living water.

This living water that not only slakes our own souls but also that of those around us,

It bubbles up and over from the source within us.

The source is calling us deeper,

So that we come to intimately and experientially know this love as the source of our very being.

This allows us to fully enter the world as Jesus did,

As we flow outward with the vitality of the living water that fountains forth from within us,

From the source.

The more we allow this flow,

The more we discover the freedom of pouring ourselves into life and saying yes in the biggest,

Boldest possible way.

So I'll end with just reading a verse from Isaiah 43 verse 19.

See I'm doing a new thing,

Now it springs up,

Do you not perceive it?

I'm making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.

May we discover this wellspring of living water as we dare to venture into what seems to be the wasteland of our inner beings,

Of our aloneness,

Our solitude.

May we come upon within ourselves the rich,

Precious pearl of great price,

The source of living water who dwells within us.

Amen.

Reviews

mighty talk. than you.

This is amazing; I was reading this morning Isaiah 43:17-20 and I am in awe that that is what you shared. Spirit, is so close to me and I’m so grateful. Thanks for reminding me.