Third Week of Lent (08/03/2026)

It's the most ordinary of errands.

A woman from a hot, dusty town makes her way to the well, jar in hand, to draw water.

The kind of thing that happens every day and is forgotten by evening.

Yet this time it will change her life forever.

All around the world right now, hundreds of thousands of adult catechumens are getting ready for baptism on Easter night.

They long for their rebirth on the night that Jesus is born again from the dead.

They yearn to join him at the wellspring of eternal life, the baptismal font.

As for the Samaritan woman, this encounter with Christ at the well will change them forever.

But what about us already Catholics who received from that spring perhaps decades ago? Saint Augustine famously wrote in his Confessions that God made us for himself and that our hearts are restless until they rest in him.

After detailing his long journey to faith, he then wrote, "Late have I loved you, O beauty ever ancient, ever new.

Too late have I loved you.

You were inside me, but I was looking outside.

I fell upon the beautiful things you had made without discerning their maker.

You were with me, but I was not with you.

You called, you shouted, and finally you broke through my deafness.

You flashed, you blazed, until you banished my blindness.

You lavished your fragrance, I gasped, and now I pant for you.

I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst for you.

You touched me, and I burned for your peace." With masterful rhetoric, Augustine spotlights our common craving for more and better and beyond.