Heard when it hurt most: found in the place of not belonging

A contemplative reflection of the Samaritan Woman at the Well as a recorded in the Gospel of John 4:5-30

There is a silence that wounds more than words. It is the silence of not being heard or acknowledged. Of being in a room and speaking but feeling as though your voice is ignored before it reaches anyone. Of trying to show who you are but being met with polite avoidance or something colder—dismissal, rejection, invisibility, and not good enough.

I’ve carried that deep sense of alienation and being silenced for much of my life. It largely shaped me in my childhood.

I grew up in a one-parent family with a high achieving brother, and that in itself carried a quiet but very real stigma. In the world I inhabited, it marked me as someone from the margins and a non-achiever. Not ever quite respectable. Not quite whole. Not really enough. That early sense of lack, of being outside what was considered “normal,” stayed with me. Add to that a growing awareness that I was gay as a teenager in a culture saturated with deep, often unspoken homophobia, and the message was reinforced again and again: I did not belong. Not in school, not in society, not with the cool kids at school, and later after I became a Christian as a young adult, not even in church.

It wasn’t until I became a young adult that I began to realise just how deeply classism was embedded in the life of the Anglican Church I had become a Christian in - particularly in my then home Church of St Mark’s Battersea Rise in London UK. I had always known I was from a working-class to lower middle-class background, but I hadn’t fully understood how much this shaped the way I was received. The unspoken codes of belonging—how to speak, how to dress, how to think, how to network—became painfully clear. Not only that but the fact that many could see that I was gay or at best having a questionable sexual orientation, I was desperate to belong, to feel accepted by Christians who said they followed the way of Jesus, but this was not to be - I was a problem. I saw how people like me were subtly, sometimes not so subtly, made to feel we didn’t belong. I didn’t speak the right language. I didn’t go to the right schools (grammar or private schools), I didn’t come from the right family or social world. And so often, I was treated as if I had arrived at the party without an invitation. Interesting, but not quite the sort of person they were looking for.

Even in later life, in ministry in the Anglican Church of England —where one might expect to be known, to be part of a shared vision—I often felt sidelined (with the exception of the Diocese of Southwark which was a good experience). Only when I came to Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada, where being gay was not seen as an impediment and where I have for the first time felt deeply valued working for a wonderful Bishop and involved at a senior level in the area of mission, have I begun to feel valued and listened to at the age of 57. That is over 20 years of ordained ministry where there were only moments I have felt truly listened to. Fortunately, my calling, shaped by a contemplative heart and a deep desire to reach those outside traditional church spaces, I have sensed the deep love of God whilst feeling misunderstood by the wider church. Regarding the CofE I still know that there are senior leaders still at the heart of ministry and the church who really did not value my work or ministry because I was partnered and gay, and for some also because I was more of an Anglican catholic Christian than evangelical. There are days when I wonder if I’m still that teenager, waiting for someone to really see me.

And then I return to this story. John chapter 4: 5-30.

Jesus, weary from his journey, sits by a well in the heat of the day. And a woman comes. A Samaritan woman. We know the context—despised by Jews, avoided by her own people, a woman with a complex and likely painful past. She comes at noon, when no one else would. She comes to avoid being seen.

And yet Jesus is already there, waiting.

This is not chance. This is choice.

Jesus seeks her out—not despite her story, but because of it. He knows her wounds, her failures, her tangled relationships. He knows the shame that drives her to the well alone. And instead of turning away, he leans in. He listens.

More than that, he honours her with conversation, with presence, with attention. He speaks with her, not at her. He reveals himself to her more directly than to almost anyone else in the Gospels. "I am he," he says, when she speaks of the Messiah. He entrusts her with the truth of who he is. He gives her dignity by taking her seriously.

For her, this moment is everything. It breaks something open. She leaves her water jar behind and runs back to the town—the same town that had likely shunned her—and she becomes a witness. A woman who had no voice becomes the first evangelist in John’s Gospel.

That’s the power of being heard. That’s the transformation that happens when someone sees you not as a problem to be solved or a mistake to be hidden but as a beloved child of God.

When I read this story slowly, contemplatively, it’s not just about her. It’s about me. It’s about all of us who’ve known what it is to be passed over, misunderstood, or unloved. Jesus meets her at the place of her isolation—and he meets me at mine. The well becomes a holy place, not because of water, but because of the love that listens.

Contemplation invites us to stop running, to stop hiding. It draws us to our own wells, to the places we go when we think no one will follow. And there, in silence and stillness, the voice of Love speaks. Not loudly. Not to impress. But with truth and tenderness.

You are known.
You are heard.
You are loved.

And maybe that is what heals us most.

A Prayer at the Well

Jesus,
You who waited by the well,
who crossed boundaries to meet the rejected,
who listened with love and spoke with truth—
meet me in the places I hide.
In my shame, my silence, my longings.
Let me know I am seen.
Let me hear your voice speaking gently to the wounds I carry.
And may your listening love
awaken in me the courage to be
fully known, fully loved,
and fully alive.

Amen.

Photo 1 by Mohammad Mardani on Unsplash
Photo 2 by Nikhil P Chandane on Unsplash