It was August of 2013 when I began an essay about Ivan Mestrovic’s sculpture of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well. Lauren Winner, my mentor at the time, gave us an assignment to write an essay about something that we researched. We could put ourselves in the story, but she was trying to get us to expand our writing repertoire. She told us she was tempted to give us the topic: Write the history of the pencil. She (sort of) laughed after she said it, and we laughed too, but had she been serious we would’ve done it. If you’re a student of Lauren Winner’s, you do what she says.
So I’m in St. John’s cafeteria, at a wooden table next to the windows, and I open up a fresh notebook and begin taking notes on Ivan Mestrovic. I learn about his life, his work, and I jot down as many questions as I can about the conversation between Jesus and this woman.
The story has always bothered me. I feel defensive of the woman whose name we never learn. I wonder what happened to her after she ran from the well named after the man who wrestled with God.
Some summer in the early 2000s, when Jesse was a student at Notre Dame, I would ride my bike from our apartment and sit at this sculpture while I waited for him, and we’d ride back home along the St. Joseph River, towards Corby’s and the East Race. I sat on a bench behind the sculpture, waited, and looked at the quad. It took me a while, probably a few weeks, to notice Jesus and the Samaritan woman and when I did I was shocked. Why in the world would this sculpture be out in the open? Who would want to think about this story while they’re taking a break from classes, or watching the football team march towards Notre Dame stadium?
At the same time I was working on this essay, I was reading Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader. In an annotation on Russian literature, she compares the soul to water: “The soul is not restrained by barriers. It overflows, it floods, it mingles with the souls of others.” I wonder if this mingling is what we are looking at when we sit beneath the trees or circle the well to get a closer look, and the mingling is uneasy, awkward, heated. If this place on campus was meant for restoration and appreciation of Mestrovic’s work, then we must find rest in knowing our souls are weary, that there will be struggle ahead, and the people – the other souls – we run into will shake us up quite a bit. “Out it tumbles upon us,” Woolf writes, “hot, scalding, mixed, marvelous, terrible, oppressive – the human soul.” It’s the encounter, the struggle that marks us as we turn to go home with our empty jugs.
The essay I was writing since 2012 was not working and I gave up on it until one day in December of last year I had an idea to write the story in the third person with a college girl as the main character. I don’t say her name because I’m playing around with parallelism, but the essay is Creative Nonfiction and anyone who knows me knows very well who this girl is. Or, who this girl was. If anything, the girl is getting better at allowing herself to be marked by the struggle.
I’m quite proud of this essay. It’s the closest to trying to write like Flannery O’Connor I believe I’ll ever get. Thank you to the early readers who helped me with it: Howard Schaap, Rachel Woldum (who sent Hadley and Harper all the Betsy-Tacy books one fall afternoon, and we’ve been delighted with those girls ever since), Laura Turner, Chrysta Brown, Lauren F. Winner, Sarah Wells, and Jessica Rapisarda. Also, thank you to Meg Jenista, Diane Westerink, and Leonard VanderZee who helped me with the research.
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