Dear Friends,
Sixteen years ago, I promised to pray from the breviary 5 times a day until my death. It is the prayer of the Church. The Church is always at prayer, and someone somewhere is always praying the breviary. The breviary is set up in a four-week cycle, at the end of those four weeks you start all over again. Now during those four weeks of prayer one will pray at least once all the psalms of the bible. One of the very first psalms of the first day of the first week is psalm 63 and this psalm speaks of thirst. It begins like this, “O God, you are my God, for you I long…My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water.”
Each one of us has a thirst. We were born with a thirst. There are several ways that people seek to satisfy that thirst. Some seek to satisfy it with power, possessions, pleasure, or prestige, but these never completely satisfy. Only our Lord, only Jesus, the divine fountain of Grace, can satisfy that thirst. The author of psalm 63 knew that only God could quench his thirst, “O God, you are my God, for you I long…My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water.”
I have a story about a man who sought to quench his thirst, and it took him a while to go to the Divine Fountain. In 1491, the year before Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue a boy was born into a wealthy noble Spanish family. He was the youngest of eleven children and he was baptized with the name Inigo.
Growing up Inigo was trained to be a soldier, and he had great dreams and aspirations of being a great warrior rescuing damsels in distress. He immersed himself in the concerns of the courtly life of the castle preoccupying himself with the politics of the time. He quenched his thirst with power and honor and earthly glory. In one of his first battles, however, a cannon ball shattered Inigo’s tibia. His broken leg was badly set, and it didn’t heal very well. It was very crooked. The surgeons thought it best that the leg be re-broken and reset. And so it was, but then a knot of bone developed just beneath the knee. This bit of bone had to be sawed off. As you can imagine Inigo had months of recovery. He was confined to a bed in his parents’ castle. And although his leg eventually healed, he would walk with a limp for the rest of his life.
Now during those long days of being confined to bed Inigo asked for books to read. He wanted books about war and soldiers and heroism. But all that could be found in the castle were two books, one on the life of Christ, and another on the lives of the saints, so he read. He was disappointed but he read them anyways, at first only to pass the time, but after a while he began to enjoy them, and he began to spend whole days in reading and re-reading them. At one point he said to himself, “These saints were men just like me, why can’t I be a saint too?” And in this fervor, he made great plans to visit Rome and the Holy Land and to join a monastery. But these thoughts didn’t last. He soon began to think again about the glory of becoming a war hero freeing cities, rescuing people in distress, and if it was a damsel in distress, all the better. But these thoughts too went away. And then it was back to Jesus and Saints. So, during his months of recuperation, he flip-flopped between wanting to seek worldly glory and heavenly glory. One day it was the world, the next day it was heaven. During this time, he noticed a difference in his heart. When thinking of battle-field glory he was for a time filled with delight, but it didn’t last; he noticed that he would later be filled with certain bitterness and heaviness of heart. However, when thinking of Jesus and the Saints, thoughts which came from God, he found that his soul was filled with consolation, peace, and tranquility. He came to realize that only God could bring contentment to his soul. He began to repeatedly pray to God, “What can I desire besides you?” Inigo found that his thirst was only truly quenched by our Lord. At the age of 33 Inigo began his studies for the priesthood. It took him ten years. And today we know him as St. Ignatius of Loyola founder of the Jesuits.
St. Ignatius began his life like the deaf-mute of today’s Gospel. He was deaf to the Word of God, and he wasn’t communicating that Word to anyone. He had a thirst, but he was looking in all the wrong places to quench that thirst. But then his ears were spiritually opened, and he began to speak of our Lord, in both his words and his actions. He had his own ephphatha; his soul was opened to faith and his thirst was quenched. Bishop Barron once said that Jesus, by placing his finger into the deaf mute’s ear was plugging the man into the divine current. He was plugged into God. And once hooked up he was able to hear the saving word and then to speak of it to others. We hope for the same we hope to be hooked up to that divine current. Psalm 63 speaks of this, the Psalmist is filled by God, and he can’t remain silent, he says, “My soul shall be filled as with a banquet, my mouth shall praise you with joy.” And when we are hooked up to that divine current, we tell everyone with our words and our actions.
St. Ignatius once plugged into the divine could not keep quiet. He went on to do great good for the Kingdom of God. And today we are still learning from him. He’s still teaching us. St. Ignatius had a favorite prayer that really kept him plugged into God. It’s the Anima Christi prayer. He began all his holy hours with this prayer. Many people pray this prayer after receiving Holy Communion.
From our mother’s womb, in fact even before you were conceived, you had been personally called to an eternal, enthralling embrace with the Blessed Trinity. This is the only real satisfaction of our thirst and it’s through Jesus, through his healing touch, through every Eucharist, through every sacrament that he’s saying to us ephphatha! Be open, be open to my grace, hear me, let me live in you, and then speak of me, don’t hide me. So let us pray that after every sacrament, during all our prayer that we are open to that healing grace, open to that divine current.
Let us be great Saints,
Fr. Christopher J. Ankley