St. Catherine Laboure' Church

One morning in late March I was sitting on my patio in meditation, thinking about Thomas Merton's statement:  "It is the silence of the world that is real."   I heard bees buzzing around the newly green mesquite trees and saw a lizard silently darting up another tree in search of flies that had fortuitously appeared.  The sun was bringing into being another day, slowly awakening a cool desert.  As it became warmer and the sun more intense, I began to be distracted by a growing thirst.  My thirst was easily satiated should I decide to break my meditation and go inside for a glass of water.  I hesitated until eventually thirst engaged my entire intention.  Once I paid attention to it, I could not ignore it.

A number of places in Showings, revered mystic Julian of Norwich describes Christ as thirsting, both in a physical and in a spiritual sense.  Christ thirsted upon the cross in his Passion, and Julian dwells on this thirst throughout her writings.  In the 31st Chapter of her Long Text, Julian writes,

   For insofar as Christ is our head, he is glorious and impassible;  but with respect to his body, to which all his members are joined, he is not yet fully glorified or wholly impassible.   For he still has that same thirst and longing which he had upon the Cross, which desire, longing and thirst, as I see it, were in him from without beginnings; and he will have until the time that the last soul which will be saved has come up into his bliss.