Thursday 1 July 2021
Thursday of week 13 in Ordinary Time
or Saint Junipero Serra
Spiritual Reading
Your Second Reading from the Office of Readings:
Thursday of week 13 in Ordinary Time
St Jerome's homily on Psalm 41 to the newly baptized
I will go up to your glorious dwelling-place
Like a deer that longs for springs of water, so my soul longs for you, O God. Now just as those deer long for springs of water, so do our deer. Fleeing Egypt – that is, fleeing worldly things – they have killed Pharaoh and drowned all his army in the waters of baptism. Now, after the devil has been killed, they long for the springs of the Church: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
We can find the Father described as a spring in Jeremiah: They have abandoned me, the fountain of living water, to dig themselves leaky cisterns that cannot hold water. About the Son we read somewhere: They have forsaken the fountain of wisdom. Finally, of the Holy Spirit: Anyone who drinks the water that I shall give will have a spring inside him, welling up to eternal life. Here the evangelist is saying that the words of the Saviour come from the Holy Spirit. So you see it very clearly confirmed that the springs that water the Church are the mystery of the Trinity.
These are the springs that believers long for. These are the springs that the souls of the baptized seek, saying My soul thirsts for God, the living God. The soul does not just feel like seeing God, it longs for him fervently, it is on fire with thirst for him. Before they received baptism, the catechumens spoke to each other and said, When shall I come and stand before the face of God? What they asked for has now been given them: they have come and stood before the face of God. They have come before the altar and been confronted by the mystery of the Saviour.
Welcomed into the body of Christ and reborn in the springs of life, they confidently say: I will go up to your glorious dwelling-place and into the house of God. The house of God is the Church, the ‘dwelling-place’ where dwells the sound of joy and thanksgiving, the crowds at the festival.
So then, you who have followed our lead and robed yourselves in Christ, let the words of God lift you out of this turbulent age as a net lifts the little fishes out of the water. In us the laws of nature are turned upside down – for fish, taken out of the water, die; but the Apostles have fished us out of the sea that is this world not to kill us but to bring us from death to life. As long as we were in the world, our eyes were peering into the depths and we led our lives in the mud. Now we have been torn from the waves, we begin to see the true light. Moved by overwhelming joy, we say to our souls: Put your hope in the Lord, I will praise him still, my saviour and my God.
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In other parts of the world and other calendars:
Saint Oliver Plunket, Bishop, Martyr
After a portrait (c.1681) by Garrett Morphey (c.1655 - 1715).
From letters of St Oliver Plunkett dated 1671, 1674 and 1681
We shall have martyrs' blood to irrigate and fertilise the Church
1671 – The kindness and charity of your lordship are such that you have been pleased to express appreciation of my poor service in cultivating the vineyard of the Lord in this afflicted country and in corresponding with the Holy See, venerated and loved by me with a spiritual affection and reverence, as also with an earthly affection because as a good mother it nourished me for many years in Rome while I lectured there, as well as with other honours too great for my weakness to bear. God knows that I think of nothing else, day and night, than the service of souls, which is the service desired of me by the Sacred Congregation and the Holy See. Political or temporal matters have no part in my life: neither in my mind nor on my lips nor with my pen are they given any place. God knows how I laboured last year, 1670, in visiting six large dioceses, in holding a provincial council and various diocesan synods, and how I laboured this present year in the dioceses of Clogher, Down and Dromore, as well as my own.
1674 – We are in greater fear and trembling here now. In Scotland parliament has decreed that for the future it will be a lèse-majesty to hear Mass. It seems as if the times of Nero, Domitian and Diocletian have come round again. We shall have martyrs’ blood to irrigate and fertilise the Church. These edicts do not at present include Ireland, because it is not named by the King in them, but I am sure that, as usual, we shall not be forgotten.
1681 – Sentence of death was passed against me on the fifteenth. It has not caused me the least terror or deprived me of even a quarter of an hour’s sleep. I am as innocent of all treason as the child born yesterday. As for my character, profession and function, I did own it publicly, and that being also a motive of my death, I die most willingly. And being the first among the Irish, I shall, with God’s grace, give good example to the others not to fear death. I expect daily to be brought to the place of execution where my bowels are to be cut out and burned before my face, and then my head to be cut off. What speech I will have at my death will be sent to you. If I had obtained sufficient time to have brought my witnesses from Ireland, I think I should have defended myself as regards these romances of treason; but it was not granted to me, and I was brought to my trial destitute of all legal ways of defence.
Copyright © 1996-2021 Universalis Publishing Limited: see www.universalis.com. Scripture readings from the Jerusalem Bible are published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. Text of the Psalms: Copyright © 1963, The Grail (England). Used with permission of A.P. Watt Ltd. All rights reserved.