Psalm 2

Many waters cannot quench love. (Song of Songs 8:7)

"He whom they sought was dead, but their hope of Resurrection was not quenched....They departed with joy, yet full of fear. Is this in Scripture? Yes, the second Psalm, prophetic of the passion of Christ, says: 'Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice before him with trembling'; rejoice, to be sure, for the Lord who has risen, but with trembling, because of the earthquake, and the angel who appeared like lightning." -- St. Cyril of Jerusalem.

Psalm 1

"Depraved by prosperity and unchastened by adversity, you desire not the peace of the state but liberty for license....Though crushed by the enemy, you put no check on immorality, you learned no lesson from calamity; in the depths of sorrows you still wallow in sin." -- St. Augustine, City of God, I, 33 (tr. by D.B. Zema, SJ and G.G. Walsh, SJ)

Psalm 1: (5) Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; (6) for the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

The Lord is great in Sion and high above
 all the peoples. (Psalm 98)

"There is no aspect of the interior life, no kind of religious experience, no spiritual need of man that is not depicted and lived out in the Psalms....If we really make them our prayer, [we] let God pray in us in His own words." (Thomas Merton, Praying the Psalms)

He knew another place, a wood...

He knew a path that wanted walking;

He knew a spring that wanted drinking;

A thought that wanted further thinking;

A love that wanted re-renewing.

--Robert Frost, "A Lone Striker" 

For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.

The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away. (1Peter 1:24)

"A mother is she who can take the place of all others

 but whose place no one else can take."

--Cardinal Gaspard Mermillod

What the Pope Should Have Said

“Does it please you, O God, to deliver into the hands of these beasts the defenseless children I have nourished with your love? I beseech you, dear Lord, protect these whom I am now unable to protect.”

--Prayer of St. Clare when her convent was under siege by Muslim attackers. Her feast was August 11th.

By acknowledging your sins strip away your former self, seduced as it is by destructive desires, and put on the new self, renewed in the likeness of its Creator....Those whose sins still cling to them like a goatskin will stand on His left because they did not approach Christ's fountain of rebirth....Wash yourself clean, so that you may hold a richer store of grace.

--St. Cyril of Jerusalem