The Scriptures today place two scenes side by side: a queen traveling across deserts in search of wisdom, and the Lord Jesus pointing not to deserts but to the interior wilderness of the human heart. The Psalm stands between them like a quiet guide: “The mouth of the just murmurs wisdom… the law of his God is in his heart.” On this date the Church also keeps the optional memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes, where a spring of water appeared alongside a call to penance. Wisdom, purity, healing; each is finally a matter of the heart turned toward God.

A visit for wisdom

The queen of Sheba arrives in Jerusalem with questions, caravans, and gifts (1 Kgs 10:1-10). She has heard of Solomon, but report must give way to encounter. She finds not only answers to her riddles but an ordered life: a palace, a table, attendants, offerings; so harmonious it takes her breath away. Strikingly, she blesses not merely the king but the Lord: “Blessed be the Lord, your God… in his enduring love for Israel.”

That is the highest insight of her visit. She recognizes the Source. Solomon’s wisdom is real, and it is also received. The order of his court mirrors, for a time, an order of soul under God.

Yet Scripture will later tell us that Solomon’s heart “turned” (1 Kgs 11). Gifts, achievements, and even a reputation for sagacity cannot secure the heart if it ceases to draw from the Source. The queen brings rare spices; the narrator notes that never again would so many be given. Abundance can be unrepeatable. Wisdom must be renewed.

The quiet speech of the just

Psalm 37 does not trumpet; it murmurs. The just person’s mouth “tells of wisdom” because “the law of his God is in his heart.” The direction is inside-out. The fruit is stability: “his steps do not falter.” The Psalm also locates agency in God: commit your way, trust him, and “he will act.” Wisdom is not cleverness weaponized; it is communion with God that steadies the tongue and the feet.

In an age of loud takes and instant replies, this murmur is countercultural. It is not silence born of fear, but speech that has been sifted by prayer and formed by the Word. The Alleluia acclamation makes the same point: “Your word, O Lord, is truth; consecrate us in the truth.” Consecration; being set apart for God; happens as the heart is steeped in the truth of God’s word.

Jesus turns to the heart

In the Gospel (Mk 7:14-23), Jesus does more than correct a ritual misunderstanding; he re-centers religion. Food that enters the stomach cannot defile the person; it bypasses the heart. “What comes out of the man… from his heart,” he says, “defiles.” He then names the interior sources: evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.

This is a sober catalog. It refuses the comfort of blaming the world for our sins. Influences matter, but consent is interior. The battlefield is the heart, where desires are sifted and choices are made.

At the same time, Jesus does not reduce religion to private feeling. He is purifying worship, not abolishing it. Food laws pointed to holiness; now their sign gives way to what they signified: a people made pure not by diet but by grace. There is an irony worth savoring here: if no food can defile, there is One “bread come down from heaven” who can sanctify. What cannot make us unclean on the outside, Christ can make new from the inside.

Ordering the inside and the outside

Solomon’s court displayed an external harmony that flowed, at his best, from a heart attentive to the Lord. Jesus insists that real uncleanness springs from within when the heart fractures. The lesson is not to despise outward order or habits, but to let them be transparencies of an interior conversion.

Contemporary life is full of attempts to manage the outside; nutrition plans, minimalist aesthetics, digital detoxes. Many are good. But “clean eating” cannot cleanse envy. A curated home cannot cure arrogance. App filters cannot filter malice. Jesus invites a more radical hygiene: repentance, truthfulness, and love engraved in the heart. Then the mouth “murmurs wisdom,” not because it has memorized talking points, but because it has learned to love what is true.

Lourdes: purity as gift

On this day the Church remembers Our Lady of Lourdes. In 1858, Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous, a poor girl from a miller’s family, in a rocky grotto beside a dump. A spring broke forth where there had been none. Healings would follow; far more numerous would be conversions and a quiet courage among the suffering.

Mary’s words to Bernadette were simple and demanding: prayer, penance, processions, a call to the priests for a chapel. Later, she named herself “the Immaculate Conception,” not to turn attention to herself, but to point to the sheer gratuity of grace. Purity of heart is not self-manufactured; it is received. Lourdes is a geography of this truth: God brings living water out of stone, sanctity out of poverty, hope out of illness.

Juxtapose that with the queen of Sheba’s caravan and Solomon’s shimmering court. God is not against beauty or order; he grants them. But at Lourdes, the place of healing is a grotto, and the wisdom arrives through a child who could barely read. The Source remains the same; the vessels are humble.

Practicing the interior life today

Toward a heart that breathes God

The queen of Sheba was breathless at the sight of wisdom’s order; Jesus wants to give us a heart that breathes God; receiving his Spirit, exhaling truth and charity. Psalm 37 promises that when we commit our way to the Lord, “he will act.” That is the deepest good news today: the God who calls us to interior purity is the God who provides it. Under Mary’s patronage at Lourdes, and under the searching gaze of Christ, may we let him act; consecrating us in the truth, so that what comes out of us is no longer the old list of sins, but the even older music of love.