"Come and see the man who told me everthing I ever did." John 4:29.

I have often thought that if I had to choose a Gospel personality that I would like to be, that person would definitely be the Samaritan woman. Here is a person not very much esteemed in the society of that time, a woman, a Samaritan, one who did not have a husband, who was probably poor, laden with problems, and a person whose future looked pretty bleak. Yet the fact that she had had five husbands and was, at the time she met Jesus, living with a man who was not her husband, shows her to be a beautiful woman, of a strong personality, intelligent and determined to find "Mr. Perfect" in her life. A practical and functional woman able to fetch her own water and carry on with her life.
As she goes to the well she sees a man sitting there, quiet and peaceful in His manners, and looking rather tired. She tries to ignore Him even though He is looking at her with kind and gentle eyes. Her feminine instinct is on the alert. She is a woman who knows men and also knows what they are capable of. Yet the Evangelist tells us that Jesus asked her for a drink and from there He led her through a conversation which brought about her conversion. "come and see the man who told me everything I ever did."
This woman went to fetch water and there encountered Christ. He reads and reveals her soul to her. She is given the grace to know and see everything she ever did. All her sins and failures. This is a sort of a personal version of the "Warning" in the way some prophets of our time, and Scripture, say that everyone will soon experience. It is a great grace for the Samaritan woman, because she experiences a profound conversion.
I am inclined to think of her as one who became a close follower of the Lord, making her way into the small group of women who provided for Him out of their own means. On the way she must have become a spiritual daughter of the Blessed Virgin, His Mother. And I am apt think that she was one of the select few who were given the grace to be witnesses to His crucifixion. Those souls were chosen from all eternity.
We know through tradition that those persons at the foot of the Cross as the Evangelist mentions them, ended up living the rest of their days in silent contemplative prayer, doing penance and meditating on the great event that they had witnessed.
We know that the Mother of Jesus ended up in Ephesus with John, the beloved disciple of the Lord, They lived a quiet, prayerful life, silently pleading for the success of the early Church.
So too tradition tells us, that Mary Magdalene, who was also at the foot of the Cross, made her way west
where she spent the last decades of her life in a small hermitage on a mountain in France.
Think about it a little. Who could experience such an enormous event as the crucifixion of the Son of God, the greatest event in history, without being profoundly effected by it?
And so to must those few women who stood at a distance watching that Divine Drama unfold. Never has a human being been witness and experienced such intense love from the One who is Love Himself as those select few who were on Golgotha on that Friday afternoon.
The Samaritan woman who had encountered Christ by the well of Jacob may have very well been one of those women. Furthermore she may have very well been called to spend the rest of her days in silent solitary meditation of her Lord's passion.
In those days the Gospels had not yet been written, but those who were given the grace to experience those Divine events were indelibly marked and in their memory, was imprinted the greatest story ever told. A memory from which they could draw their meditations for the rest of their lives in this world.
"O the depths and the riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God, how inscrutable His judgements, how unsearchable His ways."
Perhaps this is the reason He allowed the other apostles to run away from the experience on Golgotha. For if they too had been eyewitnesses of those most Sacred moments, they would have also become strict contemplatives and would not have spread around the world preaching the Good News.