Fons Amoris (Fount of Love): Homily for the Third Sunday in Lent

Lord, you are truly the Savior of the world;
give me living water, that I may never thirst again.

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ; these words of the Gospel acclamation are the prayer that should be on our lips when confronted with the admonition in the responsorial psalm on this third Sunday of Lent:

If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

My dear brothers and sisters, the purpose of the fasts and abstinences of Lent are so that we can unite our hearts of stone, with the tender heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who united his nature with our hearts of stone, so that we may receive this living water that he pours out for us unceasingly.

But what is this living water? To appreciate this, we are going to need to digress a little.

Every priest is obliged to say the prayer “Cleanse my heart and my lips, O God, that I might worthily proclaim your holy Gospel” before proclaiming the Gospel. In the context of today’s lectionary, I reflected that the same prayer may also usefully formulated as “Pierce my heart and my lips O God, that I might worthily proclaim your holy Gospel.”

In this context think of Moses saying to God: “I am of uncircumcised lips” (Exodus 6:12, 30) and the Prophet Isaiah’s similar complaint that he is a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips (Is 6:5), and God’s constant plea that we circumcise our hearts (Deu 10:16; Jer 4:4 ; Rom 2: 29). To circumcise, as you well know, is to trim away flesh with the circumcising blade. In other words, it involves piercing the flesh.

With this context we are better equipped to appreciate this reference in psalm 105(41) to the living water that pours from the heart of Our Lord

He pierced the rock to give them water;

it gushed forth in the desert like a river.

Christ had a body like ours, and it is a fact of nature that when life leaves our bodies, the body becomes hard, like rock. It stands to reason, therefore, that the heart of Our Lord, the same heart that you and I share, would have been hard as rock when the centurion Longinos, pierced His side with the lance, and thrust the spear so deep that it pierced this now rock like heart and blood and water flowed out (Jn 19: 34).

It is this piercing of our heart and our lips that we attempt through our Lenten sacrifices and penitence; so that we may be vulnerable, like Our Lord who allowed his side to be pierced.  Just like Him, through the weariness of fasting we seek to offer our sides so that our hearts may be pierced and in this way be properly circumcised.

We are now in a position, dear brothers and sisters, to ask the question, what is this living water that Our Lord offers us?

St. Caesarius of Arles (470 – 543) points out that:

If he had not been struck, so that water and blood flowed from his side, the whole world would have perished through suffering thirst for the word of God.

This is the thirst that Our Lord promises to extinguish when He speaks with the Samaritan woman:

              whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; 
the water I shall give will become in him
a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

Once the word of God is in our hearts, it begins its work of circumcision, for as St. Paul teaches us in his letter to the Hebrews (4:12):

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

But this river, that pours out of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, does more than just circumcise our hearts. In the epistle this Sunday, St. Paul teaches that:

the love of God has been poured out into our hearts 
through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

It was love that poured out of the heart of Our Lord, His love for us, and this river of love, continues to course and flow over all the earth, as it did at the start of creation (Gen 2: 6), through the Holy Spirit that washes over us at baptism.

This Lent, through our fasts and abstinence, through our prayers animated by these fasts, let us draw close to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was pierced for love of us, so that we may never thirst for love again, and instead be springs of living giving water to others!

Lord, you are truly the Savior of the world;
give me living water, that I may never thirst again.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful on 7 March 2025 at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Old Goa.)

(Image reference: The Entombment, Peter Paul Rubens, ca. 1612, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.)

Take Up Your Cross! Homily for the Second Sunday in Lent

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ; we are a week and some days into Lent, and by this time on the second Sunday of Lent we might be asking ourselves, why is it that I am giving up so many things are so apparently good? Why am I abstaining from social media and films, why am I giving up chocolates and desserts, why have I stopped drinking alcohol, why fast? Why can’t I cheat, just a little?

To those of us who are asking this question, Our Lord, in the Gospel episode of the Transfiguration, gives us a clear answer. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (556) teaches us that “the Transfiguration gives us a foretaste of Christ's glorious coming, when he ‘will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body.’”

And he was transfigured before them;
his face shone like the sun
and his clothes became white as light.

This is the prize for which we are competing during Lent my dear brothers and sisters, for a body that will be like His on the Day of Judgement when the dead are resurrected. For, as Our Lord promised:

Then the just will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. (Mt 13: 43)

To get there, we need to exercise as in the words of St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians (9: 24-27):

Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.

This glorified body clearly comes with some costs, we have to punish ourselves, and this is why we do what we do during Lent. So that we may not be disqualified on the Last Day when “all causes of sin and all evildoers” will be thrown into the furnace of fire (Mt 13: 41-42). The Catechism of the Catholic Church also teaches us that “it is through many persecutions that we must enter the kingdom of God.”

Listen to the rhetoric of St. Augustine addressed to us through the person of St. Peter:

Peter did not yet understand this when he wanted to remain with Christ on the mountain. It has been reserved for you, Peter, but for after death. For now, Jesus says: "Go down to toil on earth, to serve on earth, to be scorned and crucified on earth. Life goes down to be killed; Bread goes down to suffer hunger; the Way goes down to be exhausted on his journey; the Spring goes down to suffer thirst; and you refuse to suffer?

Do we, my dear brothers and sisters, refuse to suffer during Lent? Do we wish to convert Lent to merely a period of comfortable abstinence? If so, then we now know that we are not doing enough. If Lent is the time for spiritual warfare, then it must also be the time for heightened spiritual exercise, and this exercise can only be done through physical exertion and physical pain. And St. Paul assures us in his letter to the Romans (8:18):

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us

How does one make the pain that we suffer during these spiritual exercises count for our good and the rest of Holy Church? Very simply, when we feel the very real bite of hunger, or the pain of the mortification we have chosen, we repeat the words of St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians (1:24):

In my flesh I take up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, the Church.

To those of you who have taken up the Cross this Lent, through sacrifice and physical mortification, I direct the words from St. Paul in his letter to Timothy which we read today:

Beloved:
Bear your share of hardship for the gospel
with the strength that comes from God.

May Our Lord cause His Blessed Mother, and His saints, to pray for you and His angels minister to you through this Lent.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Old Goa on 1 March 2025.)

(Image reference: Christ Carrying the Cross, Titian, 1560 c., Museo del Prado.)

The Constant Gardener: Homily for the First Sunday in Lent

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Christ Jesus. Just a few days ago, as the ashes were imposed on our heads we heard the solemn words:

Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris

Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return

On that day, we also heard the advice of Our Lord,

when you pray, go to your inner room,
close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.

In today’s Gospel, when Our Lord – soon after His baptism – goes into the desert to pray, He demonstrates to us what this advice means.

We can, however, go deeper into this mystery. The desert is a place of dryness, where water is lacking and this signifies the dryness of our spirits when, because of our sin, we are distanced from God. We should hold this idea in mind when we read the first lines of the first reading this Sunday, from the book of Genesis:

The LORD God formed man out of the clay of the ground
and blew into his nostrils the breath of life,
and so man became a living being.

Reflecting on these words St. Augustine reminds us that we were made not just of dry dust, but rather from clay, or mud, which is “a mixture of earth and water.” In other words, God wet the dry earth, and infused this wet earth, this clay, with His spirit.

In the desert, and through His Passion, and now from the wound in  His Most Sacred Heart, Our Lord similarly irrigates the desert, of our souls, with his sweat, tears and blood. His entire Passion was undertaken, so that the dryness in which we found ourselves could be irrigated and then made a receptacle for His Holy Spirit.

If He provides the water and Spirit that makes us, to use the words of St. Iraneus of which I am very fond; “fully alive,” then it makes sense to understand that we are the ones who provides the dry earth, or humus, so that it may be irrigated, and planted with His seed, the Holy Spirit, so that we may bear fruit “a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty” (Mt 13: 8). Psalm 104: 29-30 underlines the fact that without His Holy Spirit, we are just dry earth:

when you take away their breath, they die
    and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit, they are created;
    and you renew the face of the ground.

This dry earth, this humus, is the inner room that Our Lord referred to on Ash Wednesday. With the help of His Passion and death, and the gift of His Holy Spirit, He wishes that this desert be converted into a garden that will bear much fruit. (It was not for nothing that the first encounter with the Risen Lord took place in a garden, and He was mistaken for a gardener – Jn 20: 15).

Listen to the words of the prophet Isaiah (5:1b – 2):

My beloved had a vineyard
    on a very fertile hill.

He dug it and cleared it of stones,
    and planted it with choice vines;

This is the work that Our Lord would have us do, as he also suggests in the parable of the sower (Mt 13: 1-9, 18-22).

He would have us plough it deep, to remove the stones in the soil, the weeds or thorns, so that when He sows and irrigates it with His Word this humus will reap much fruit.

And how would we plough this dry earth? With the prayer, fasting, and penance of Lent. Understand prayer as the act of ploughing, and we get a sense of how we must pray; repeatedly, letting the tip of the plough go ever deeper into our soul. As many of you well know, I am fond of ejaculatory prayer, a single verse repeated over and over again, so that it becomes entrenched in our hearts. This is ploughing of the soul. The fast and other penance is the process through which we collect the stones in our hearts, those emotions, desires, attachments, that we realise we do not need, and can – or must – do without.

My dear brothers and sisters, in the opening words of the first reading I suggested that we find three things: flesh (dust), water, and the Spirit. The same combination of objects is to be found in the episode of the baptism of Our Lord. His earthly body (our flesh) enters the river Jordan (water) and the Holy Spirit descends on it to recognize Our Lord as the beloved Son of God. This is what happens to us at baptism, where our dry earth is irrigated with the sweat, blood, and the water from the side of Our Lord and the Holy Spirit gives us new life, and repeatedly at every sacrament, and Eucharistic communion. All we need to do is ensure that the soil is ploughed deep, something we also do at confession.

My dear brothers and sisters, Our Lord commands us today to go into our inner room, the desert of dry earth, and cultivate it so that it could become a garden. The Christian tradition recognizes Our Lady as the Hortus Conclusus, the enclosed garden. A garden that was cultivated through constant prayer and humility, patience and perseverance. On this first Sunday of Lent, let us turn to this Hortus Conclusus, and petition Her help so that we may convert our inner deserts into the enclosed gardens of the Lord through the rest of these thirty-six days.

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.

(The homily was written exclusively for this virtual congregation I have the privilege to address.)

(Image reference: Christ appears as a gardener to Mary Magdalene (Noli me tangere), Maerten de Vos, 1585.)