The following reflection by Alex Mikulich was written as part of the Prayer-Study-Action (PSA) resource offered for the third week of Lent 2026, prepared by members of the Pax Christi USA nonviolence working group and nuclear disarmament working group. As we brace ourselves for deeper conflict in Iran and across the Middle East, we recognize that the nonviolent peace with justice which we strive for is woven with many threads — threads of racial justice, disarmament, ecological justice, and human rights for all.
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By Alex Mikulich
Pax Christi USA Nonviolence Working Group
Former member of the Pax Christi Anti-Racism Team (PCART)
In her beautiful and prophetic reflection on the Samaritan woman at the well, Amy Woolam Echeverria calls us to hear the cries of the Samaritan women in this world, including Subanens, and hear the cries of Mother Earth. In his 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis calls people of faith to bend our ears to the cries of women and the earth who both suffer the deadly consequences of racial capitalism (Laudato Si’, #49).
Yet we seem to be blind to an even deeper transformation to which Pope Francis and Amy invite us to engage so that we may enjoy the abundance of God’s living water here on earth. Although traditional Indigenous lands have been reduced to 22 percent of the earth’s land area—due to white settler colonialism and practices of capitalist resource extraction—scientists find that “80 percent of the world’s biodiversity is found on territories stewarded by Indigenous peoples.” (Hannah Rundle, Indigenous Knowledge Can Help Solve the Biodiversity Crisis, Scientific American October 12, 2019). As capitalist practices, including ecotourism and militarism, “modernize” Indigenous ways of life, “and accelerate consumerism and urbanization,” these and other factors “are driving a cultural die-off.”
As the US president finds fault with Bad Bunny speaking Spanish at the Super Bowl, scientists link linguistic diversity with a plentitude of biodiversity. Hannah Rundle explains that as the world loses one language every two weeks, eroding the global diversity of seven thousand languages, the earth and all its inhabitants lose the diversity of local species.
The task before Pax Christi USA in this moment of destruction of Black and Indigenous peoples and their lands throughout the earth, is not one of protection. Black and Indigenous peoples know well how to live in harmony with the earth. The task is one of transformation where we shift away from destructive economic growthism to living in harmony with the earth’s own metabolisms, its cycles of regeneration, that have provided living waters of life since the beginning of God’s creation.
Composting is one way of shifting to a transforming way of life in harmony with earth’s metabolisms. Carmelite Sister Vilma Seelaus, in her prophetic essay, “Crisis and Transformation: Turning over the Compost Heap,” invites us to relearn how “dark times condition us for God,” for through these times of crisis, “something as simple as the compost heap, familiar to organic farmers, powerfully symbolizes the reality of God at work in the human life crisis.”
Deeper communion, deeper solidarity, begins with the breakdown of the comfortable, the familiar, of all that we have staked our lives on, including our comfortable attachments to white supremacy and economic growthism. Like bacteria that generates heat and transformation for the compost heap, Sister Vilma invites us to notice how the Spirit energizes our personal and societal composting, to shift from self-possession and control to surrender to God, to others, and to the earth. Composting of the earth and of our entire way of life is only possible through the Spirit who transforms us within the societal dark time we struggle in now. The Spirit draws us into a new way of being that gives life abundant. Yet we must let go of what we most cherish.
For too long now, Pax Christi has been fragmented in the way we divide nonviolence, antiracism, disarmament, and ecological intimacy. Too often I see and hear Pax Christi members or locals assume that we are innocent of white supremacy and we fail to perceive how anti-Black violence is intimately interwoven with US neo-colonial violence, economic injustice, and ecological destruction. We too, as Pax Christi USA, need to compost our own attachments to the assumptions of innocence, comforts, and control that maintain anti-Black white supremacy. All of our human and non-human kin need us to hear the cries of all peoples and the earth for justice and life. Like all life on earth, we must die too, we must compost what must die in our society and us. Then we may yet become one human family relishing and thriving in the living waters of God’s creation.
Alex is the author of Unlearning White Supremacy: A Spirituality for Racial Liberation (Orbis Books, 2022) which includes this chapter, Embracing ecological intimacy.
Reflection: “Sacred waters”
By Amy Woolam Echeverria
Pax Christi USA Nonviolence Working Group
Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation Coordinator, Missionary Society of St. Columban
The Gospel for this Sunday, March 8, is John 4:5-42, the Samaritan woman at the well.
The story of Jesus meeting the woman at the well is a deep source of hope and comfort for Christians. By encountering the Samaritan alone at the well and asking her for a drink, Jesus demonstrated that his love was not constrained by social norms and cultural expectations. The woman quickly realized that the water Jesus offered her was to the living water of eternal life. Does this mean that the Samaritan woman’s well is reduced to being a symbolic backdrop to the deeper well that was Jesus? I don’t think so. Jesus showed us that the spiritual and material intermingle at the well, at the table, by the sea, and on the land. What would have happened if the Samaritan woman could not have gone to the well?
For many Indigenous Peoples around the world, this is a very real question because their sacred waters are under threat. For Subanens in Mindanao, Philippines, their sacred lake, Duminagat, is under just such threat. This lake, tucked in the protected park of Mt. Malindang, will soon be overtaken by eco-tourism. While people still need to hike in order to reach the lake, the governor of the province has greenlighted the project that is right now stripping the mountain (also sacred) to make roads so that tourists can consume the lake’s beauty.
I met with Subanen women who spoke of the deep sadness, anger, and vulnerability they feel to be losing access to their sacred living waters despite their best efforts to protect the lake. Their ancient rituals, beliefs, and identity still practiced today are intimately tied to Duminagat. I imagine them much like the Samaritan woman, who expressed a deep sense of connection to land and the well by noting that the mountain where she and Jesus met was sacred for her ancestors. In our own country of the United States, industrial pollution and radioactive contamination cause cancer and other life-threatening health conditions to many people especially in rural communities.
This Lent, let us remember that the sacred waters of the well for both the Samaritan and the Subanen were and are real places of encounter with the Creator. Let us find ways to protect the sacred waters wherever we are.
