Attention and the Path to Wholeness

"Dreamweaver’s Prayer" by Rose J. Percy

A holy conversation

Words in dialogue with breaths

Subtle reminders of life persisting

I am s/weeping

Lines of dust away from the

Dreams I am weaving when

My mind is quiet enough to let them

Untangle themselves

From the mention of messing up

I pray

That you can just let me be (here)

With myself

And okay

I pray

Wholeness is a dream we weave

strong enough for those

carrying the load

of rest in their hopes

Opening Image: The Well at Noon

Jesus, tired, sits at a well in the heat of the day. A woman arrives alone.

This is a place of fragmentation—ethnic divides (Jew/Samaritan), gendered divides (man/woman), personal history (her marriages). 

Noon heat suggests isolation rather than community.

Fragmentation: The Wounds We Carry

The woman embodies fragmentation—within herself (her complicated past), between communities (Jew/Samaritan hostility), and in relation to tradition (Jacob’s well vs. Jerusalem).

Parker Palmer: “We arrive in the world undivided, whole, but we soon find ourselves split between inner truth and outer life.”

The woman comes for water but carries the weight of multiple disconnections—consider the disconnections do we carry as a community

[Willie J. Jennings in After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging] 

We work through a history of fragmentations—true for people of color but also as white people (whiteness hides it well)

How do we design communities that are in tune with the fragments we all carry? That calls us into a re-membering that leaves none of us alone with our fragments?

Integrity: The Courage to Show Up Whole

Jesus does not bypass her story; he names it. He does not shrink away from the uncomfortable truths or offer her a quick detour around her pain. Instead, he speaks directly to the heart of her life: “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’…for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.”

In that moment, Jesus models what integrity looks like: to hold the truth without flinching, to neither condemn nor conceal, but to acknowledge. He refuses to reduce her to her past, yet he refuses to pretend it doesn’t exist.

By naming her story, Jesus affirms that she is more than the sum of her fragments. He shows that God’s living water flows not around our realities but through them.

Integrity here is not perfection but truth-telling. Jesus saying “You are right in saying…”

Palmer: take about integrity as “becoming more fully oneself in the face of the world’s expectations.”

The woman’s fragmented life is not erased but seen—and in being seen truthfully, she is re-knit.

Social context matters: in the ancient world, women often needed husbands for financial survival and social standing. Her five marriages may not reflect scandal but necessity—she needed provision and protection in a patriarchal system. What looked like moral failure to others was actually a strategy of survival.

Attention: A Way into Wholeness

Jesus gives her his full attention; she gives him hers. In a culture of dismissal, their mutual attention becomes healing.

Her testimony—“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done”—is not about shame but about being fully known.

Attention is how integrity gets recognized and nurtured. It is also how fragmentation begins to be healed.

Communal Wholeness: Receiving Testimony

The people believe “because of the woman’s testimony.” Her fractured life becomes the vessel of good news.

But they don’t stop there; they move toward their own direct encounter with Jesus.

Question for the church: What kind of community must we be to receive the testimony of those who are fragmented, marginalized, or dismissed?

Do we dismiss testimony because of its source (like the disciples astonished at Jesus speaking with her)?

Or do we let testimony interrupt us, expand us, make us whole?

Conclusion: The Path to Wholeness

Wholeness is not “having no cracks.” It is being able to say, like the Samaritan woman: Here is my whole self—fragmented, seen, and still worthy of living water.

Me: There is a truth of fragmentation in the world, but we have always been called to wholeness.

For us: Wholeness is collective. It depends on a community willing to listen, believe, and be changed by the testimonies of those the world renders fragmented.

Echo Palmer: “Wholeness does not mean perfection; it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.”

The woman leaves her jar—what she thought she needed—and goes with a new spring rising inside her. (she is the new vessel)

Personal Testimony

I've recently realized that these last four years that I've spent studying the poems of Lucille Clifton, I really latched onto them because there was a way that her poems highlighted for me a journey of fragmentation I felt within myself and felt within the Black diaspora.

I must repent for putting her words above Jesus's words. (reference my bio “draws from the wells of Christ and Clifton”) There is only one well with the living water—let no distractions flavor or dilute it.

My critique of the progressive church: it feels like we approach Jesus as if we invite him to a party and he is in the backroom. We put all the cool flashy/edgy things up front that we eventually want to lead back to him.

And yet, notice: the Samaritan woman did not lead with clever arguments, or flashy performance, or even a carefully constructed theology. Her testimony was simple and direct: Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done. She put Jesus at the front, not the back. She centered the encounter itself, not the packaging around it. I invite us to do the same.

In this way, she becomes our teacher. Progressive or traditional, the church risks missing the power of her witness if we bury Jesus under our own ideas of relevance. Liberation comes not through backroom introductions, but through open encounter at the well.

Reflection Questions:

How might you cultivate the kind of attention Jesus offers? How do you receive others when you are fully present in your daily encounters?

What does it look like to listen to one another into wholeness? How does it call us to see, through distraction and fragments, where there is unmet need or desire?  

What jars are you still carrying—symbols of old needs, survival strategies, or identities—that Jesus may be inviting you to lay down?