Encountering the Other- Part 1

This article is an attempt to provide an attitudinal approach to discussing vital moral and ethical issues, whether in the cultural, theological, political, and/or medical/bioethical context. This approach is based in reason and applicable to all people of good will, but is also rooted in a Christian understanding of the human person and further enhanced by a careful study of how Jesus revealed truth to others. It is the central contention of this article that the revelation of truth should occur within a dialectical process that affirms the goodness of the person regardless of their response to the truth. This is because the truth about a particular issue and about the human person more generally must be anchored in love, which is a commitment to what is best for the other person. Whenever truth is disassociated from love, dialogue gives way to argumentation, and reason gives way to power.

The article begins with a Biblical narrative: Jesus revealing the truth of His divinity to the Samaritan woman at the well. The article generalizes from this scene an attitudinal approach for discussing ethical and moral issues that maintains the bond between truth and love, and thus advances the authentic good of the human person. This methodology has close ties to the social teaching of the Catholic church regarding the nature of the human person. 

Having set forth an approach to discussing the truth in love, the article then applies this approach to hot button issues not to highlight the issues themselves, but to test and apply the effectiveness of the approach. We have chosen to use the issues of abortion, transgenderism, and organized religion and the occult to analyze the impact that can be made when dialogue respects the inherent connection between truth and love that is vital to the flourishing of the human person.

Unity of Hearts as the Fruit of Love for the Person and Service to the Person

We begin by reflecting upon the account in St. John’s Gospel of the woman at the well (Gospel of John 4:7-42. Jesus says to the woman, “Give me a drink.” It is important to recognize that while on the surface, Jesus is asking a favor of the woman, what unfolds is that the woman benefits far more than Christ, such that Christ is actually doing her the favor by asking for a drink. Jesus tells her in response to her refusal to give him a drink: “If you only knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”^[1] This tells us that the disposition which best facilitates the finding of truth is one of service to the other. Jesus needed to overcome the Samaritan woman’s unwillingness to serve Him in order to reveal the truth to her, in order to reveal to her the “gift of God,” which is Jesus and the salvation He brings. The question then becomes, how can we instill in the person we are dialoguing with a sincere desire to serve? Only when the person is affirmed in their goodness and loved as a person, as an end good in him or herself will people generally desire to serve. For service is rooted in gratitude, a recognition on the heart level that one is loved and respected. Since then we need to facilitate a disposition of sincere service to reveal the truth to a person, we need to love the person unconditionally. This love must be manifested apart from any disagreement with the content of what the person believes, says, or does.

Let us see then how Jesus loves the woman such that she acquires a disposition of service that makes possible the reception of truth. The woman is hostile to the request of Jesus and says, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? For Jews have no dealing with Samaritans.”^[2] Here, it is clear that the woman presents to Jesus the opposition between Jews and Samaritans, but what she implicitly says to Jesus is that He has nothing in common with her. The opposition between Jews and Samaritans is thus crystallized and concretized in the supposed opposition between the Samaritan woman and Christ. Christ responds to this apparent opposition by turning the tables on the woman. He says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,” you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”^[3] In other words, Christ says, I desire to go good for you by giving you living water. What I have to offer you is infinitely better than what you can offer Me, and moreover, I desire to give you this gift. Here, we have a glimpse of a common ground or a measure of unity; Jesus desires to give a gift to the woman, but does she desire this gift In order to firmly establish common ground with the woman, Jesus needs to get the woman to desire that which He is offering, the gift of God, eternal life. He says, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”^[4]  Jesus tells the woman in a manner of speaking that she will not have to come back to the well as a way of making her desire this living water, eternal life. The woman then expresses her desire for this gift of God: “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.” Here then Jesus establishes some measure of unity or common ground with the woman at the well.

Here we pause to reflect upon the expression of unity or common ground as an expression of love and respect for the person in his or her totality. From the perspective of the truth bearer, one needs an attitude of “sentire” or “listening” as opposed to “ascoltare” or “hearing.” The truth bearer needs to enter into the mystery of the one to whom he is speaking. Within himself he has to ask the question, what does this person really desire and what do they need to attain their legitimate desires? He has to listen with his heart. This will evoke in the one he is speaking to the beginning of trust. Without trust, there is no communication. Think of the etymology of the word “communion,” which is “cum”-with, plus “unio”- unity, with unity. The truth bearer must seek unity with the other first before anything else. This is why communion within the Church is inextricably tied to salvation in God’s providence. The way Christ creates this union with the Samaritan woman is through offering her a gift and then getting her to desire that gift. This then is a model for creating unity: offer to serve a legitimate need of the person and convince them that this service is good for them. The person, such as the woman at the well, feels loved and moved by this disposition of service, such that they desire what the person is offering. Now true dialogue can take place within the context of giving and receiving, not argumentation and power. Serving the person as a means of loving the person creates the unity necessary for dialogue.  

Even further, we can understand something of the kind of unity that is conducive to the revelation and reception of truth. The key that we can deduce from Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman is that the unity established is not an extrinsic idea, an agreement upon content, or a meeting of the minds with regard to a proposition, but an attitudinal conviction that both the truth bearer and the receiver want what is best for the receiver. In short, the unity that is essential for sharing the truth in love, evangelization, is not so much a unity of ideas or concepts, but a unity of desiring what is the good for a particular person. It is a union of hearts that makes possible the transmission of truth in love. Jesus convinced the Samaritan woman that He had her good in his heart, so she was willing to listen to the content of what He said. We need to create union on the heart level to effectively communicate truth through the mind. What is essential is a union of hearts to the degree that the receiver believes that the truth bearer truly cares for his or her good. Love for the person preconditions the dialogue so that when the truth comes out, it can be received and assimilated.

Assurance that the person is ready for the reception of truth: the importance of vulnerability and sensitivity to prior wounds

Before proceeding to the revelation of truth in a dialogue conditioned by love, it is important to ensure that the person is ready for the revelation of truth. One of the strongest indicators that the Samaritan woman is ready for the truth is her level of vulnerability. She begins the dialogue with Jesus with no vulnerability, saying, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”^[5] She says this because “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.”^[6] But then once Jesus explains that He came to satisfy her thirst, to bring her water that will satisfy her thirst eternally, so that she will never have to come back to the well to draw water, she says, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.”^[7] In other words, she acknowledges her need for Jesus’s help, she exposes her need and so makes herself vulnerable. It is as if the Samaritan woman said, “I have a need, please help me.” Only once this need is exposed by the woman and she, thus, demonstrates true vulnerability, does Jesus reveal the truth to her. The more vulnerable a person is, the more they are prepared for the reception of the truth. Without this vulnerability, the woman would not be willing to endure the truth Jesus was about to reveal.

Jesus reveals a painful truth to the woman once she is vulnerable, namely, that she is living in a state of adultery, but even then, he does so in an indirect way by saying, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”^[8] The woman fully aware of her irregular situation, acknowledges, “I have no husband.”^[9] She says, in other words, the man I am living with is not my husband; I am living in adultery. Jesus, seeing this increased vulnerability, then reveals the full magnitude of her sin, saying, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly.”^[10] Here it is important to recognize that Jesus couches the expression of her sin in the language of affirmation. He begins His exposition of the woman’s sin with “you are right in saying” and ends with “this you said truly.” Why would He do this? Because He is linking her vulnerability to the revelation of her sin, such that the woman herself reveals her own sin and Jesus affirms her self-revelation. The truth about her sinfulness is not coming from Jesus, but from herself. Since she is vulnerable, Jesus is able to reveal her sin by affirming her own words. Here we see that the Samaritan woman’s need, her need for salvation, is also a wound, the wound of adultery, that needs to be healed for salvation to occur. If Jesus were to reveal the woman’s sin without her vulnerability and without being delicate through doing so indirectly and by affirming her, he would risk opening up this wound and blocking the penetration of truth into her life, and her assimilation thereof.

We must, therefore, be constantly attentive that when we reveal the truth to someone, we do not unnecessarily open up an existing wound. Unlike Jesus, we do not know what wounds are hidden in the person’s life. If Jesus then who is Truth Himself^[11] and knew the woman’s wound of adultery was careful to ensure that she had the requisite vulnerability and to present her sin very carefully, how much more important is it for us to ensure vulnerability prior to revealing the truth? Otherwise, we risk opening up a wound and harming the person. For the truth that opens up a wound is no longer conditioned by love. It is raw truth. The human person called to communion on the level of knowledge and love can only assimilate truth fruitfully and experience conversion if it contextualized within an interchange of love. “‘To be human means to be called to interpersonal communion’ because the image and the likeness of the Trinitarian God are the basis of the whole of ‘human ethos’ which reaches its apex in the commandment of love.”^[12]

Revealing the Many Dimensions of Truth

Now we are ready to discuss the manner in which our Lord reveals the truth to the Samaritan woman. First, as we previously established, He reveals the personal truth that the woman has sinned by living in a state of adultery and He reveals the extent of this sin in that she has been with five men. Here, given the personal nature of this truth and the presence of a wound from the adultery, our Lord leads the woman to reveal this herself, “I have no husband,”^[13] using her own vulnerability to avoid aggravating the wound. We established that in revealing personal truth to a person that is closely connected to a wound, it is best to be cautious and ensure proper vulnerability so as not to aggravate the wound, particularly given our lack of knowledge of the person’s history and interior life. Nevertheless, it is also important to point out that our Lord did reveal the full extent of the woman’s sin. He did not lessen its true nature, but tells her plainly, “you have had five husbands.”^[14] Here, we must be careful to avoid camouflaging the serious nature of sin by presenting it as no big deal or relativizing it as trivial given the universality of sin. Jesus is very careful to ensure that the woman is open to this personal revelation of her sin so that she can receive the gift of salvation, but He does not fail to articulate the seriousness of the woman’s sin. It would be a mistake to implicitly or explicitly convey the message that personal sin is anything less than a serious failure to love God and others.

Moving on from the personal revelation of the woman’s sin of adultery, a personal and delicate truth, our Lord begins to reveal to the woman the relational aspects of truth. In particular, He suggests that the woman’s personal sin impacts how she worships God. He says, “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.”^[15] In other words, He says that we cannot worship God truly unless we know Him. This suggests that the real harm of the woman’s sin of adultery is that it has prevented her from truly knowing God, from a relationship of trust and intimacy with Him. In this regard, Jesus tells her explicitly, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.”^[16] It is as if the Lord said, “You cannot worship the Lord and continue to live as you are living.”  

The Lord then tells her how to live and worship God. He says, “But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.”^[17] Those who worship God must do so in truth, that is, they must be living in the truth, not in a state of adultery or any other sin. The way we live and how we worship are intimately connected. What this tells us is that how we live tells others whom to worship and how to worship. Our actions precede our words in evangelization. Jesus is able to affirm that true worship is worship in truth because He had already established that He knew the truth, which is why the woman calls him a prophet.^[18] To prophecy is to witness to the truth of God by how we live and what we say. We must all prophecy so that those to whom we bear the truth know that we are truly living the truth we bear.

But not only must we worship in truth, we must also worship in spirit, that is, in union with the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Blessed Trinity. For we can worship in truth but our power to praise God is limited. When, however, we worship in the Spirit, God praises Himself through us.^[19] In other words, our life is really His life;^[20] He is living in us and expressing His truth through us. What this requires is that we surrender to the Holy Spirit and let him direct our life. For the woman, this means accepting that she cannot keep living with men who are not her husband. Her life is not her own, but she has the consolation of belonging wholly to God. 

Notice that the orientation of true worship is to the Father. Not only that, but the Lord says that the Father seeks out those who will worship Him in spirit and truth.^[21] This means that the woman did not find Jesus who pointed her to the Father by accident, but because the Father sought her out. In other words, the Father sent Jesus to the Samaritan woman to bring her salvation, which is expressed most profoundly in worshiping the Father in spirit and truth. The meeting at the well was a Divine appointment and the woman did not recognize the time of her visitation. Jesus draws out of the Samaritan woman the conviction that she is the special object of the Father’s love. She then expresses confidence in the coming Messiah because she knows that she is loved, saying, “I know that [the] Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when He comes, He will show us all things.”^[22] The woman understands that truth is inseparably connected to the coming Messiah.

So Jesus has taken the Samaritan woman from the personal truth of her sin to the relational truth that she must change her life to worship God in spirit and truth. Now he does the most beautiful thing: he reveals Himself as the Messiah who brings the truth. He says to the woman: “I who speak to you am he.”^[23] In another passage of St. Johns Gospel, he is more explicit, saying that not only does He reveal the truth, but He is the Truth.^[24] So the Truth is not an idea, but a person, the person of Jesus Christ. To reveal truth is to reveal Christ. We should be careful not to present the truth in an abstract way devoid of one’s relationship with God, for to do so is emphatically not to present the fulness of truth and so risk discouraging the person from the difficult path of conversion. It is also significant that once Jesus reveals Himself as the revealer of truth par excellence, the Messiah who comes from the Father, the Samaritan woman feels known and understood. The Scriptures allude to this in the passage where the Samaritan woman says to the people of her city, “Come see a man who told me all that I ever did.”^[25] Now it is highly unlikely that Jesus literally told her everything that she did in her life. What is more likely is that the woman feels loved and known by Jesus to such a degree that He may as well have told her everything she ever did. This statement of the woman we believe is meant to suggest that the woman left her encounter with the Truth convicted that she was profoundly known and loved for who she was, regardless of her sins. This tells us that if the revelation of truth is done correctly, the recipient of the truth will come to see themselves as understood and loved, not judged and condemned. In other words, the truth bearer sets the truth receiver free from the shame of their sin. When the truth is preceded by and accompanied by love, then the truth has the effect of liberation. Our Lord mentions this property of truth to set people free when He says expressly, “If you continue in My word, you are truly My disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”^[26]

Our Lord thus moves from the revelation of personal truth to relational truth to Himself as the source of truth. In revealing the truth, the truth bearer must be careful to present the truth in a relational way, such that it points to Christ. Otherwise, the person receiving the truth may depend too much on themselves instead of coming to Christ who can then reveal the fulness of truth in perfect love. This does not mean that we need to present Christ expressly, particularly if the person is not open to a relationship with Him. But it does mean that we must not present the truth in such a way that it appears as sufficient apart from a relationship with Christ. We must present the truth as an invitation to a relationship with Christ. 

^[1] John 4:10 (Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition).

^[2] John 4:9.

^[3] John 4:10.

^[4] John 4:13-14.

^[5] St. John 4:9.

^[6] St. John 4:9.

^[7] St. John 4:15.

^[8] St. John 4:16.

^[9] St. John 4:17.

^[10] John 4:17-18.

^[11] John 14:6.

^[12] Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 33 (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace), quoting St. John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem, 7.

^[13] John 4:17.

^[14] John 4:17.

^[15] John 4:22.

^[16] John 4:21.

^[17] John 4:23.

^[18] John 43:19.

^[19] St. Matthew 10:20: Jesus says, “for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” 

^[20] In Galatians 2:20, St. Paul expresses it this way: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

^[21] John 4:23.

^[22] John 4:25.

^[23] John 4:26.

^[24] In St. John 14:6, Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

^[25] John 4:28.

^[26] John 8:31-32.