Living Water for a Doom-Scrolling Nation
We check our phones 144 times a day. Jesus offers a new spring that never runs dry.
Dear friends —
Letters from Leo is publishing daily Lenten reflections through Easter, available exclusively to paid subscribers.
Each meditation will explore what it means to follow Jesus more faithfully in the midst of American civic and political life — not as partisans first, but as Christians whose consciences are shaped by the Cross.
Lent is a season of repentance, renewal, and resolve.
It is a time to confront our idols, strip away our illusions, and allow the light of God’s redeeming love to search and purify our hearts.
I hope you will walk this forty-day road with me — as your brother and fellow sinner — embracing prayer, sacrifice, and deeper conversion, and allowing the God of liberation to claim every corner of our lives and our public witness in an age of creeping authoritarianism.
“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” — (John 4:13–14)
The average American checks their phone 144 times a day. Every check is a small act of hope — that something on the screen will finally deliver the thing we can’t name but keep searching for. A notification. A text. A dopamine hit dressed up as connection.
We know the feeling of drawing from that well and coming away thirstier than before.
Today’s Gospel gives us one of the most remarkable encounters in all of scripture. A Samaritan woman comes to Jacob’s well at noon — the hottest hour of the day, when no one else would be there. Five marriages have ended. Her current arrangement is something less than that. She has organized her entire life around avoidance, and the well at midday is the architecture of her shame.
Jesus is sitting there waiting for her.
He asks her for a drink.
This is scandalous on every level — a Jewish rabbi speaking to a Samaritan, a man alone with a woman, a holy man initiating contact with someone the religious establishment had written off. But Jesus has never cared about the boundaries that keep human beings separated from God.
As we reflected yesterday, God never tires of reaching out to the ones who think they’ve wandered too far.
Pope Leo XIV, in his Angelus address today, noticed something beautiful about this encounter: Jesus speaks with the woman, listens to her, and shows her respect — “without a hidden agenda and without disdain.” In his parish homily this evening, the pope went further: “The thirst for life and love of the Samaritan woman is our thirst: the thirst of the Church and of all humanity, wounded by sin but even more deeply inhabited by the desire for God.”
That line should stop us. More deeply inhabited by the desire for God. Even our worst habits of avoidance — the doom-scrolling, the overwork, the compulsive checking of metrics and mentions — are misdirected thirst.
Underneath every addiction to approval is a craving for the only love that doesn’t come with conditions attached.
I know this because I live it. I check my email before I pray most mornings. I measure my worth by subscriber counts and open rates before I’ve sat with myself or God. The Samaritan woman’s noon-hour trip to the well is my 6 a.m. reach for my phone — returning to a source I know won’t satisfy because the alternative requires a vulnerability I keep putting off.
Exodus gives us the same pattern on a national scale.
