Lesson from Fr. Paulus | Lesson: We Have Two Types of Thirst

My dear brothers and sisters, we all experience two kinds of thirst in life, and unless we understand the difference between them, we will always be frustrated.

The first kind of thirst is horizontal thirst. We thirst for, we desire, the good things of this earth: food, drink, companionship, fun, entertainment, a nice house, a good income, success at work or school. It's part of our nature to desire these things; there's nothing wrong with them.

But we also have another kind of thirst - vertical thirst. This is a deeper thirst, a deeper desire. It's a desire for meaning and purpose. This desire is also built into our nature. There is nothing we can do to destroy it, just as there is nothing, we can do to destroy our natural desires for food and water.

But unlike horizontal thirst, our vertical thirst cannot be satisfied by our own efforts. Only God himself can satisfy it. And he created us like that on purpose. It's as if he put a homing device in the very core of our being, and it constantly draws us towards him, towards intimate, personal contact with his eternal, transcendent love.

This is why even when all of our horizontal thirsts are satisfied, when we have money, success, and pleasure, we are still restless. Our deeper, vertical thirst can't be satisfied by things of this world. As the Catechism puts it: "Man is made to live in communion with God, in whom he finds happiness" (#45).

The meaning and purpose which alone will give us true happiness comes from friendship with God in Christ, not from worldly success, pleasures, and human relationships. When we forget that, when we try to satisfy our vertical thirst with horizontal stuff, we put ourselves on the road to frustration, tragedy, and disappointment.

Jesus Gives a Drink

That's what the Samaritan woman had spent her life experiencing. She had had five husbands, the Gospel tells us, and now she was living with another man, and hadn't even bothered to marry him this time.

She was coming to the town well in the middle of the day, the Gospel tell us, the hottest time of the day, when none of the other women in the town would be coming to the well. She wanted to avoid them.

Here is a woman with great spiritual sensitivity, and yet, she is living a life of frustration and alienation, of loneliness and inner turmoil. She has been trying to slake her vertical thirst, which only God can satisfy, with horizontal stuff: human love, comfort, earthly pleasures.

She has learned the hard way that that formula doesn't work. She has learned that she needs a Saviour. She needs to find the "spring of water welling up to eternal life." She needs to find "the gift of God." She needs to discover Christ. And she does – Jesus reveals himself to her, and her life turns around, one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.

She runs back to the village announcing the good news to anyone she can find. And we know from the Gospel that Jesus and his disciples ended up spending three days there, and the whole town came to believe in him.

She and the people of her town had been wandering through a spiritual desert, their souls slowly dying the death of frustration, boredom, and meaninglessness, even while they enjoyed material pleasures and prosperity. But Christ changed all that.

We need look no further for the secret to happiness; Christ himself is the rock and the water flowing in the spiritual desert of this fallen world.