I will enter God’s dwelling
From a sermon on Psalm 41 addressed to the newly baptized by Saint Jerome, priest (c. 342-420)
I will enter God’s marvelous dwelling place
As the deer longs for running water, so my soul longs for you, my God. Just as the deer longs for running water, so do our newly baptized members, our young deer, so to speak, also yearn for God. By leaving Egypt and the world, they have put Pharaoh and his entire army to death in the waters of baptism. After slaying the evil, their hearts long for the springs of running water in the Church. These springs are the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Jeremiah testifies that the Father is like a fountain when he says: They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, to dig for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. In another passage we read about the Son: They have forsaken the fountain of wisdom. And again, John says of the Holy Spirit: Whoever drinks the water I will give him, that water shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into eternal life. The evangelist explains that the Savior said this of the Holy Spirit. The testimony of these texts establishes beyond doubt the three fountains of the Church constitute the mystery of the Trinity.
These are the waters that the heart of the believer longs for, these are the waters that the heart of the newly baptized yearns for when he says: My heart thirsts for God, the living fountain. This is not a weak, faint desire to see God; rather the newly baptized actually burn with desire and thirst for God. Before they received baptism, they used to ask one another: When shall I go and see the face of God? Now their quest has been answered. they have come forward and they stand in the presence of God. They have come before the altar and have looked upon the mystery of the Savior.
Having received the body of Christ, and being reborn in the life-giving waters, they speak up boldly and say: I shall go into God’s marvelous dwelling place, his house. The house of God is the Church, his marvelous dwelling place, filled with joyful voices giving thanks, and praise, filled with all the sounds of festive celebration.
This is the way you should speak, you newly baptized, for you have now put on Christ. Under our guidance, by the word of God you have been lifted out of the dangerous waters of this world like so many little fish. In us the nature of things has been changed. Fish taken out of the sea die; but the apostles have fished for us and have taken us out of the sea of this world so we could be brought from death to life. As long as we were in the world, our eyes looked down into the abyss and we lived in filth. After we were rescued from the waves, we began to look upon the sun and look up at the true light. Confused in the presence of so much joy, we say: Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, in the presence of my savior and my God.
Source: The Liturgy of the Hours – Office of Readings
Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius, known as Jerome, (c. 342-420) was born in Dalmatia, studied at Rome under Donatus, the famous pagan grammarian and acquired great skill and knowledge of the Latin, Greek and great classic authors. He became a Christian convert and was baptized by Pope Liberius at Rome in 360. He became an ascetic at Aquileia in 370 joining a group of scholars under Bishop Valerian among whom was Rufinus. The group broke up and Jerome traveled to Antioch. There, a vision of Christ caused Jerome to go to Chalcis in the Syrian desert where he lived as a hermit, praying, fasting, learning Hebrew and writing a life of St. Paul. On his return to Antioch he was ordained a priest by St. Paulinus.
Jerome then went to Constantinople to study Scripture under St. Gregory Nazianzen, and in 382 he went to Rome to attend a council but remained there as secretary to Pope Damasus, who commissioned him to prepare the first complete Latin translations of the four gospels, St. Paul’s epistles and the Psalms from their original Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic texts. While in Rome, Jerome also wrote a stinging refutation “Adversum Helvidium”, denouncing a book by Helvidius declaring that The Virgin Mary had had several children besides Jesus. After the death of Pope Damasus, Jerome traveled to Bethlehem in 384.
There he headed a monastery and during the next thirty four years completed his translation of the New Testament of the Bible into Latin and completed the a translation of the entire Old Testament from its original Hebrew texts into Latin. This monumental task is considered, even today, a feat of scholarship unequaled in the Church history. This version, called the “Latin Vulgate” was declared the official Latin text of the Bible for Catholics by the Council of Trent. It is reported that Jerome once removed a thorn from a lion’s paw. In gratitude, the lion stayed with Jerome at his hermitage as a loyal companion for years. Numerous paintings by the masters depict Jerome with this lion.
Jerome’s monastery at Bethlehem was destroyed in 416 by a group of Plagian rebels angered over Jerome’s written denunciation of Pelagianism. Jerome died at Bethlehem on September 30 in the year 420 following a lingering illness. He left some 120 letters of enormous historical merit as well as numerous other writings. He is buried at the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome. The above sermon is just one of his powerful spiritual commentaries.