She Always Had A Name: Remembering Photini 

It happens every few months: someone at the parish where I work will ask me what my name is.

I am wearing a nametag. The person asking knows my name, but the question still arises because they rightly have a suspicion: that Bird is probably not the name that my mother gave me. 

On paper, my name is Allison, but I have been Bird to almost everyone who knows me since I was in college. Carrying this name beyond seminar tables and dorm rooms was important to me because names are important. How we name and address people is important.

Naming Photini

For many Episcopalians, Photini is known exclusively as “the woman at the well” or at best, “the Samaritan woman at the well.” Her name is an ex post facto addition, a well-deserved honor that translates to “luminous one” for her role as the first person Jesus reveals himself as the Messiah to. The Light of the World has shone upon her. 

Still, it’s no surprise that Photini is not given a name when she appears in John’s Gospel because hardly any women are named in the Gospels at all. Primarily it is the many Marys (Jesus’s mother, Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany), along with their close relatives and associates, like Mary’s cousin Elizabeth and Mary of Bethany’s sister Martha, who are given names. And so, while later tradition will give Photini a name and develop her story, the Gospels center her location: the well just outside of town.

A Border Story

Let us go back for a moment to those classrooms where I came to my name. I became Bird as a student in women and gender studies and later, as a graduate student and instructor in that field. This was an academic discipline with a real interest in margins and borders, and so this scholarship offers me a particular view of Photini’s physical and social location in this scripture. For this story to tell us that Jesus meets her outside the town at the well is another way of telling us that Photini did not belong—but we also know that outsiders are Jesus’s people.

Photini’s namelessness is ordinary in scripture, but it’s also ordinary in our current world; we can ignore people who don’t have names, people from places that are unfamiliar to us. Her name is a reminder that Jesus offered the full, sacred reality of his being to her because she was beloved by God. She was worthy of that knowledge, of belonging, and salvation, and the Orthodox hagiography affirms this further by placing Photini and her sisters among the first people baptized following Pentecost and dubbing her Equal to the Apostles.

As I’ve reflect on Photini’s story and the place of border language in our lives, her chosenness is ever more important. It is an encouragement to put a name to the people and places who are marked as being “outside.” For me, this means pulling out the maps, which have been one of my favorite ways of connecting with the world since I was a child. Maps were an early way that I recognized the nature of the Great Family, because when we learn the names of the places on the other side of things, when we make these places real, we can no longer ignore the needs of the people who live there. The same is true about reading stories on themes of migration and bringing those maps and stories into conversation with stories from the Bible.

A Wider View

If we want to remember Photini as more than the Samaritan woman at the well, if we want to keep conversations about the crisis in the Middle East alive, or about why refugees are coming to the United States from Central America, the particularities matter. It matters that our Christian forebears named Photini. What more can we learn about her if we synthesize a variety of tools? 

Photini’s story in John’s Gospel is brief, and yet it becomes bigger if we are willing to go deeper. In the Gospel text, the story takes place in Sychar or Jacob’s Well, which we encounter as Schechem in the Hebrew Bible. This place can also be known by its current role: the Church of St. Photini is an historic Greek Orthodox church just outside Nablus in Palestine, and it is a holy site for Christians, Jews, and Muslims. 

Photini’s story gets larger still when we read contemporary stories about collecting water, such as those depicted in children’s books like Nya’s Long Walk by Linda Sue Park or The Water Princesss by Susan Verde. It gets larger when we connect this meeting at the well with the story of the Great Family, which takes us through Schechem and which reminds us of another important meeting with a woman at a well. 

I wonder what stories, biblical and otherwise, you would add to Photini’s story of being a beloved member of God’s family found at the margins of community? I can think of so many more, and that is a wonderful thing. And it all begins by giving Photini a name again, by remembering that she always had one to begin with.