The ancient philosophers believed that the world and life itself had four central components, four elements: earth, air fire and water. All four elements are employed widely in Christian ritual. Many of you here this morning will carry memories of a world in which the parish pump was central to life. It was a gathering place, a place for swapping stories, for meeting up with neighbours. It is one of the ironies of human intercourse that public water supply schemes led to the privitisation of water. We all have this vital force on tap today, in the privacy of our own homes. Seamus Heaney is, as you know, renowned for his works of poetry. Unfortunately, this interest in his poetry has been at the expense of his beautiful prose writings. Every silver lining has a cloud, I suppose! In the 1960, when his wisdom and literary skills were not yet known outside his native Mossbawn, he captured beautifully the old world which had the village pump as its navel. He writes:

I would begin with the Greek word, omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of someone pumping water at the pump outside our back door . It is Co. Derry in the 1940s. The American bombers groan towards the aerodrome at Toomebridge, the American troops manoeuvre in the fields along the road, but all of that historical action does not disturb the rhythms of the yard. There the pump stands , a slender iron idol, snouted, helmeted, dressed down with a sweeping handle painted a dark green and set upon a concrete plinth, marking the centre of another world. Five households drew water from it. Women came and went, came rattling empty enamel buckets, went evenly away, weighed down by silent water. The horses came home to it in those first lengthening evenings of Spring, and in a single draught emptied one bucket, and then another as the man pumped and pumped, the plunger slugging up and down, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos.

The pump formed the navel of Heaney's young world. It was the navel around which women gathered, traded secrets, exchanged gossip, supported one another, and celebrated life. They formed the lifeline that linked that community to this vital force. Through that chain of women, life was sustained and the communal thirst for life and love was slaked. That same pattern was replicated not only in every Irish village, but in every location on the planet where human beings settled.

St. John locates Jesus in an identical setting. As is so often the case with John, women or, in this case, a woman, is central to the story. And this, despite the fact that women were very much second class citizens in Jewish law. For example, the legal witness of women was not accepted in Jewish Law. And this is perhaps the best evidence we have for the resurrection. According to all the scriptural accounts, the first witnesses to the empty tomb were women. Had he disciples manufactured the story, as the Roman guards said, they must surely have provided us with authentic, legal witnesses, males! So in a perverse way, the legally inferior position of women in Jewish law is the strongest evidence we have of the Resurrection of Jesus. Throughout John's gospel, women are consistently presented as being most receptive to the promptings of the Spirit and hence the message of Jesus. This is entirely consistent with human experience throughout history, right up to our own day. Today's gospel extract is but one example of this. Worn out by a days journey, he sits down by the Samaritan well for a rest. The Samaritan woman arrives to fetch water. He asks for a drink and engages her in some good humoured banter, teasing her about the colourful history of her love life. In this one act he smashed two taboos: he crosses barriers of sex and class, and the woman notices it immediately: "You are a Jew and you ask me a Samaritan for a drink?" He promises her a water that will slake her thirst forever.

20th century psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung identified water as the great womb symbol. It symbolised the paradise of prenatal life. Water was the formless world in which we first floated. Indeed Freud and Jung both advocated a return to the origins through psychoanalysis as an agent of healing. Childhood trauma would be revisited and the personality in some way reconstituted in a more satisfactory manner. On a mystical level, Jesus has introduced this idea 2000 years earlier. "Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God." We must regress to the state of Chaos that life in the womb symbolised before Cosmos or order is imposed through rebirth. A return to the origins was essential for salvation. In this way access can be gained to a new and higher mode of existence, gestation and birth must be repeated, but they are to be repeated mystically, ritually, symbolically.

Of course this symbolism would have been more obvious in the primitive Church when adult baptism was administered through full immersion at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night. But a second layer of the symbol would have been obvious, given the time of the year the ceremony was celebrated. Stated explicitly: "If we have entered the tomb with him in baptism, we shall rise with him in glory." Death and rebirth are two instances in the same act. The adult neophytes were stripped naked, anointed with cleansing oil (the soap of our day); they stepped naked into the sunken tub, three times and the minister pronounced the Trinitarian formula. When they emerged finally from the tub, they were anointed again with what would be equivalent to our perfume. They were then vested in the white baptismal gown, symbolising the new life they had entered upon. They were then ready to receive the sustaining food of this life, the Eucharist. This was very clearly and very obviously a rite of rebirth, a return to the origins, a return to the womb and an emergence into a new life to be reconstituted by the Spirit.

Heaney knew that the women at the pump in Mossbawn were re-enacting an ancient ritual, a ritual that sustained a community with the water from which we all emerged initially. The parallels with Christian baptism need not be laboured.

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