“Woman At The Well”. Acrylic and pen on Wooden Panel. 30x60”. Oct. 2019. For Dowd YMCA Prayer Chapel.
I had the honor to paint an image to hang in the prayer chapel at Charlotte, NC’s uptown Dowd YMCA. In honor of the donor who paid for the renovations, my commissioner asked that I craft an image based on the donor’s favorite passage of scripture: “The Samaritan Woman” or perhaps better known as “The Woman At The Well” from the gospel of John chapter 4. Even while we held our initial conversation in the newly designed space, I envisioned a tall vertical piece to mirror the stained glass on the opposing wall, juxtaposing fire and water. This painting is actually a slow meditation on each portion of John 4: wells of living water, the harvest, bread of obeying the Lord, the town’s conversion, 5 husbands and a lover, worshipping God in Spirit and truth, and a future hope.
Tacit Knowledge. My friend and mentor Leighton Ford published many books recently, and I have been fed deeply from “The Attentive Life”, a book much akin to the classic “Practicing the Presence of God” by Brother Lawrence many hundreds of years ago. In Leighton’s written meditations on being in tune with our Creator, I discovered his reference to late Hungarian physicist/philosopher Michael Polanyi. The following quote from The Attentive Life arrested me, and revealed another dimension of the Woman At The Well painting I had not considered - how Jesus transmits knowledge and reveals the Kingdom of God by imparting, not explicit knowledge, but “tacit” knowledge. In other words, while explicit knowledge deals with facts and concrete concepts one can clearly explain, tacit knowledge refers to complex, gut level “knowing’ of something that can only come through experience- drawing on every sense, memory, and understanding to “indwell” the thing known and so journey beyond what can be communicated simply by words.
“‘Polanyi envisioned science as an “indwelling” of what the scientist tacitly knows and discovers, as opposed to a purely rational objectivity. “We always know more than we can tell” was one key idea at the heart of his philosophy. The other was “indwelling.” We know because we “indwell” the thing we know, and in a sense it indwells us.
Indwelling, observed Polanyi, takes place in the way we know other people- getting inside their skin by an act of empathy. It happens in the way we take in a work of art. As we look at its surface, we somehow enter into the mind of its creator. Indwelling happens when we internalize moral values, not merely assenting unquestioningly to the teachings of our parents or society.’
Explicit Knowledge:
Left brain. Linear. Verbal. Rational.
Based on rational facts.
Can easily by codified and verbalized.
Can be transmitted and transferred.
Can be learned individually.
Example: George Washington was the first president of the United States.
Tacit Knowlege
Right brain. Intuitive, emotive, holistic.
“We always know more than we can tell.” Polanyi
Intuitive and summative of many sources simultaneously.
Cannot be taught, but must be “caught”, experienced- often in and through community.
Learned by doing, not verbally or rationally.
Example: Riding a bike, playing piano.
In Polanyi’s writing, he compares how we learn through “explicit” knowledge with how we learn in “Tacit” knowledge. As an artist and art teacher, I have invested over ten years studying how to train students and convey information through experiential learning, letting them actually do art projects, make mistakes, learn the touch and feel of materials, and in essence, tacitly learn. In addition, as an ambassador of Christ, I have always cared deeply about how to communicate truths about the Kingdom of God which cannot be seen or felt or purely rationally understood, but once experienced is undeniably the very cornerstone of reality. This newly discovered definition of “Tacit” knowledge gave me one more resource to clearly articulate my mission raising up a generation of Kingdom-hearted artists.
When Jesus asks the samaritan woman for a drink from the well, she responds with explicit knowledge: “you’re not suppose to be talking to me”, and “this well is deep and you don’t have a bucket”. Yet Jesus is not trying to speak literally, he is using this metaphor poetically to reveal truth about the Kingdom: I am the source of life and refreshment- ask me and I will give you living water. By the time she tastes of His divine presence and wisdom, she is on the run to her village (as the first evangelist in scripture) to tell everyone the Messiah is here!
John 4 NLT
10 Jesus replied, “If you only knew the gift God has for you and who you are speaking to, you would ask me, and I would give you living water.”
11 “But sir, you don’t have a rope or a bucket,” she said, “and this well is very deep. Where would you get this living water? 12 And besides, do you think you’re greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us this well? How can you offer better water than he and his sons and his animals enjoyed?”
13 Jesus replied, “Anyone who drinks this water will soon become thirsty again. 14 But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.”
Over the woman’s shoulder is a shadowy reference to the 5 husbands she has had before and the man she’s currently with that is not her husband (with a blue halo). Again, when the Lord asks that she go and bring her husband, her first response is that he is asking for explicit information (do I have a husband or not- or will I reveal my dark past secrets?), but in truth, Jesus is once again using this as an opportunity to reveal His role in the Kingdom, the one who knows all, who has not come to judge, but to restore, to heal, to fulfill. Her exclamation that he must be a prophet is her coming to understand, tacitly, that this man is more than ordinary. The hairs on the back of her neck must be standing up as she begins to reach into her spiritual questions.
John 4 NLT
16 “Go and get your husband,” Jesus told her.
17 “I don’t have a husband,” the woman replied.
Jesus said, “You’re right! You don’t have a husband— 18 for you have had five husbands, and you aren’t even married to the man you’re living with now. You certainly spoke the truth!”
19 “Sir,” the woman said, “you must be a prophet.
Mt. Gerizim would have physically overshadowed the interaction between Jesus and the samaritan woman, one of the two mountains that Moses read the blessings and the curses over the people of Israel during the desert wanderings. Samaritans had long before built a temple on Gerizim, the mountain of blessing, as a place of worship. The woman turns to explicit knowledge: facts and actual locations, as indicators of spiritual orthodoxy, and again, as Jesus transmits the higher ways of the Kingdom, He reveals that spirituality is not bound to explicit location but more tacitly to Spirit and Truth.
John 4 NLT
20 So tell me, why is it that you Jews insist that Jerusalem is the only place of worship, while we Samaritans claim it is here at Mount Gerizim,] where our ancestors worshiped?”
21 Jesus replied, “Believe me, dear woman, the time is coming when it will no longer matter whether you worship the Father on this mountain or in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans know very little about the one you worship, while we Jews know all about him, for salvation comes through the Jews. 23 But the time is coming—indeed it’s here now—when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for those who will worship him that way. 24 For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”
The disciples are offended that Jesus has been talking with a woman, tripping over cultural norms and unable to embrace the Kingdom mission of bringing a gospel of forgiveness and restoration to a hated subculture. They offer food, and when Jesus responds he’s not hungry, they turn to explicit knowledge and think he’s eaten something else, while Jesus flips it on them again to impart a Kingdom principle of being nourished by obedience, not only physical sustenance.
John 4 NLT
27 Just then his disciples came back. They were shocked to find him talking to a woman, but none of them had the nerve to ask, “What do you want with her?” or “Why are you talking to her?” …
31 Meanwhile, the disciples were urging Jesus, “Rabbi, eat something.”
32 But Jesus replied, “I have a kind of food you know nothing about.”
33 “Did someone bring him food while we were gone?” the disciples asked each other.
34 Then Jesus explained: “My nourishment comes from doing the will of God, who sent me, and from finishing his work.
The villagers over her shoulder are streaming down, becoming part of the “white fields” of the harvest. The disciples were so put off by talking to a woman (likely of disrepute that she was out at midday) and in an unclean samaritan town that they missed the entire purpose of Jesus’ ministry: to bring in the harvest of people to God’s Kingdom. Jesus welcomes them, stays several more days, and this woman becomes the first Christian evangelist recorded in scripture. The response of the townsfolk is brilliant too, they are basically the exclamation point at the end of my study of tacit knowledge: “we heard you tell us about Jesus (explicitly), but now that we have seen [heard, felt, received from Jesus] and we (tacitly) know that He is indeed the Messiah!”
John 4 NLT
28 “The woman left her water jar beside the well and ran back to the village, telling everyone, 29 “Come and see a man who told me everything I ever did! Could he possibly be the Messiah?” 30 So the people came streaming from the village to see him…39 Many Samaritans from the village believed in Jesus because the woman had said, “He told me everything I ever did!” 40 When they came out to see him, they begged him to stay in their village. So he stayed for two days, 41 long enough for many more to hear his message and believe. 42 Then they said to the woman, “Now we believe, not just because of what you told us, but because we have heard him ourselves. Now we know that he is indeed the Savior of the world.”
John 4 NLT
35 “You know the saying, ‘Four months between planting and harvest.’ But I say, wake up and look around. The fields are already ripe for harvest. 36 The harvesters are paid good wages, and the fruit they harvest is people brought to eternal life. What joy awaits both the planter and the harvester alike! 37 You know the saying, ‘One plants and another harvests.’ And it’s true. 38 I sent you to harvest where you didn’t plant; others had already done the work, and now you will get to gather the harvest.”
Another profound influence in my life and journey has been the gentle yet profound voice of Mako Fujimura. Mako consulted on the recent Martin Scorsese movie “Silence”, based on the seminal Japanese novel about Christian persecution and recanted faith by Shusaku Endo. From Mako’s shared Japanese and American heritage, he wrote an accompanying and magnificently layered work Silence and Beauty. In this collection of thoughts, Mako quotes Scorsese speaking about the nature of great artwork, and how a great artist invites their viewer into tacit knowledge of the subject beheld beyond what could be actually said, or shown, or known.
“Cinema is the telling of stories with images and sounds - or, in the case of avant-garde cinema, the embodiment and conveyance of emotion with images and sounds. But that’s just a job description. I think that every truly great work of art orients you towards what isn’t there, what can’t be seen or described or named [only tacitly known/discovered]. It happens differently in different forms of art. In music, in poetry, in painting, universes of emotion and mystery are circled over and felt, like feeling the contours of a passageway in the darkness. In the novel [Silence], what is said and described opens the way to what isn’t, that which can only be intimated, sensed… In the greatest movies, what we see points the way to what we don’t see, what we can’t see.”
Like Scorsese intimates, I was drawn to imagine what is NOT seen as I began to “indwell” this passage through the act of painting (thank you Polanyi and Leighton Ford)! I envisioned this woman at the well after Jesus and His disciples leave, and imagined the man she was with (blue halo) now joyfully married and committed to her- having himself encountered Jesus and been restored to right relationship with God and his community. They are surrounded by their children, moving forward in songs of praise to evangelize neighboring towns about the good news of the Messiah’s arrival.