A Lenten Sermon of St Augustine on the Forty-Second Psalm

Extract

This is a short psalm, so it can satisfy your listening minds without irking your fasting stomachs. May it feed the soul of every one of us, which is said to be sad by the psalm; sad, it seems to me, because it is fasting in some way, or rather because it is hungry. The Church is hungry, the body of Christ is hungry, that man, the whole Christ, who is all over the world, his head up above and his limbs down below. His voice singing or sighing in all the psalms, happy in hope for the future Or sighing at the sadness of the present, his voice should be well known to all of us, so familiar that we can make it our own. So I won't take up any more time reminding you who is speaking here. Let each of us be in the body of Christ, and so let it be each of us speaking here.