https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=36p00Stvkzs
So, Stephen Wong says, Hi Jonathan, I read your article, The Samaritan Woman, Baptism, and the Hexagon. That article you mentioned, The Samaritan Woman at the Well, is related to Baptism, but I don’t quite understand that. Can you explain why she is related to Baptism? Well, she’s related to Baptism because she’s the waters. She is an aspect of the chaotic waters, you could say. And so, there are two aspects of the waters below. There’s an aspect of the waters which is something like purity of the lower waters. There’s also an aspect of the lower waters which are something like the salt waters, the bitter waters, the saturated waters. And so, the Samaritan Woman represents what you could call the saturated waters because she’s had all these men, you know, and she’s had six husbands, you know, she’s had five. Her sixth husband is illegitimate and now Christ appears as her seventh husband, the one that brings her the water of life, you know. And this water of life is the water of Baptism and it’s related to Sabbath, it’s related to the seventh day in the sense that it has also to do with death and with rest, right? The Sabbath is the day that Christ is in the tomb. All these images kind of come together. And so, often, that’s why often in the icon of the Samaritan Woman, the shape of the Baptismal font is a cross. There are different versions of it, but sometimes it’s a cross because ancient Baptismal fonts were in the shape of a cross or like the four directions basically. And then the water there in this kind of, let’s say, cross, light on its side, let’s say. And so, that’s why the Samaritan Woman is related to Baptism. I hope that makes sense. So yeah. And you can also understand it like in an interesting way because this is going to flip I guess I have to do it, which is that she’s giving Christ the lower waters. She’s saying she’s bringing up these lower waters and she’s wanting to give them. And then Christ is saying, I’m going to offer you the water from above. And so, there’s a sense in which the joining of the higher waters and the lower waters, that’s the flood, by the way. That’s death. But it’s also the change into, it’s also like a kind of purification, which brings about a new world. And so, when Christ, when the lower waters and the higher waters join together, it’s also the joining, the creating of a new world. And so, this imagery that Christ is bringing is as old as the imagery of Tiamat, the dragon of the salt water, the dragon of freshwater joining together and creating the world. That’s how old the imagery that Christ is invoking here is. And so, it’s a very, very powerful story, this story of the Samaritan woman. We often, we have to be always really careful not to be tricked by the simplicity of the gospel stories. And then also, the Samaritan woman, St. Fucini, you see her, she also gets thrown into a well, her whole story, if you read her story as a saint, it’s constantly related to the well. So the well is all about what St. Fucini is about, and the well is also an image of baptism.