Year: C(I). Psalm week: 3. Liturgical Colour: Green.
Saint Gregory of Narek (c.950-1005)
He was born around 950 to a noble family in the region of Anzevatsik in Armenia: a region now on the borders of south-eastern Turkey and north-western Iran. He received a cultured and literary upbringing. As a young man he entered the monastery of Narek, of which his great-uncle Ananias was abbot. He was educated by the famous school of the monastery and spent the rest of his life there, being ordained priest and eventually becoming abbot.
His life was marked by an intense love of the Virgin Mary. He attained great heights of sanctity and mystical experience, and expounded his teaching in various mystical and theological works. In 1003 he wrote his outstanding work, the Book of Lamentations, and he died about two years later.
The Book of Lamentations retains enormous importance as a foundation-stone of Armenian literature, and remains widely influential to this day. Gregory’s work is still little known in the West but he was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Francis in 2015 and his memorial was added to the General Calendar in 2021.
About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:
Second Reading: Saint Columbanus, Abbot (540? - 615)
Columbanus was born in Ireland before the middle of the sixth century. He was a monk from his youth and was learned in both sacred and secular literature. At the age of 45 he left Ireland and went to Europe, where he founded three monasteries in what is now France. His monastic rule was strict, based on Irish practice.
King Thierry II of Burgundy had a veneration for Columbanus and often visited him. Columbanus’s criticisms of Thierry’s debauched living and practice of concubinage enraged the king’s grandmother Brunhild, and eventually Columbanus and all other Irish-born monks were ordered to be deported to Ireland. They eluded their captors, and after an unsuccessful attempt to evangelize the pagan tribes near modern-day Zürich they reached Italy, where Columbanus founded the monastery at Bobbio. He died there in 615.
Columbanus’s writings are among the earliest evidence of Irish knowledge of Latin. His style combines an underlying passion with a strong and rhythmic rhetorical structure.
Liturgical colour: green
The theological virtue of hope is symbolized by the colour green, just as the burning fire of love is symbolized by red. Green is the colour of growing things, and hope, like them, is always new and always fresh. Liturgically, green is the colour of Ordinary Time, the orderly sequence of weeks through the year, a season in which we are being neither single-mindedly penitent (in purple) nor overwhelmingly joyful (in white).
| Mid-morning reading |
Wisdom 19:22 |
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Lord, in every way you have made your people great and glorious. You have never disdained them, but stood by them always and everywhere.
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| Noon reading |
Deuteronomy 4:7 |
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What great nation is there that has its gods so near as the Lord our God is to us whenever we call to him?
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| Afternoon reading |
Esther 10:3 |
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The single nation, mine, is Israel, those who cried out to God and were saved. Yes, the Lord has saved his people, the Lord has delivered us from all these evils, God has worked such signs and great wonders as have never happened among the nations.
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