The gospel of John tells it in eleven verses. A wedding in Cana of Galilee; the mother of Jesus present; the wine runs out; she tells him; he says his hour has not come; she tells the servants to do whatever he says. Six stone water jars stand there, the kind used for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. He says, fill them with water. They fill them to the brim. He says, draw some out and take it to the steward. The steward tastes it, and it is wine, and better than the first. This, the gospel says, was the first of his signs, and it revealed his glory.
The fellowship reads this story at least once a year, and every year it says something it did not say before. Here is what it has said to one of the keepers, offered not as the meaning but as a meaning, in the manner of the Therapeutae who held that the letter is a body and the sense is its soul.
The Six Jars
The gospel is precise: six stone jars, for the Jewish rites of purification. Stone, because stone does not contract impurity as clay does, and a household careful of the Law kept its washing water in stone. Six, which is one short of seven, the number of completion. The jars are the apparatus of the old washing, the washing the desert community performed daily and John performed once, the washing of the body for the sake of the turned heart. They stand empty, or nearly, at a wedding where the wine has run out.
The mystical reading hears this: the old purity has done its work and reached its limit. The jars are good. The washing was good. Stone is good. But six is not seven, and water is not wine, and the feast of the kingdom cannot be kept on purification alone. Something must happen to the water.
Fill Them to the Brim
He does not discard the jars. He does not bring new vessels. He says fill them, and the servants fill them to the brim with the same water that was always meant to go in them. The fellowship hears in this the whole relationship of the Way to the discipline it grew from. The hours are not discarded. The washing is not discarded. The Law is not discarded. They are filled, completely, to the brim, with exactly what they were made to hold. The one who would have the wine must first have the water, and all of it.
This is why the fellowship keeps the discipline of the desert and does not apologize for it. The jars must be full. A student who wants the wine of the inner kingdom without the water of the Morning Watch is asking the steward to taste an empty jar.
Draw Some Out
And then: draw some out. The water becomes wine not in the jar but in the drawing, in the carrying, in the giving to the steward who gives it to the guests. The fellowship notes that no one sees the change. There is no word spoken over the jars, no gesture, no moment. The servants put water in and drew wine out, and the gospel says only that they knew where it had come from, while the steward did not.
The practice is like this. The student fills the jars, morning after morning, with water: silence, the text, the choice, the communion. Nothing seems to change. Then one day she draws something out, for someone else, in service or kindness or simply in the way she speaks at table, and it is wine, and she does not know when it happened. The servants know where it came from. The steward only tastes it.
The Best Wine Last
The steward's complaint is the last word: everyone serves the good wine first and the poor wine when the guests are drunk, but you have kept the good wine until now. The fellowship reads this as the promise to the continuing student. The first sweetness of the way is good wine; the dryness that follows feels like the poor wine served late. But the sign says otherwise. The best is kept until now, until the long middle, until the jars have been filled a thousand times and the student has stopped expecting anything. The steward is wrong about the order. So are we, every time.
A Caution on Reading
This is one reading. The gospel says the sign revealed his glory, and the fellowship does not pretend that a parable about spiritual practice exhausts what the writer meant by that. We offer the reading as the Therapeutae offered theirs: as the soul of a text whose body is also true, and whose body must be read first and honestly before the soul is sought. The How We Read page says more about the order. Mind first, heart second, and the jars full before anything is drawn.