Psalms

Well, I did the math. Or whatever you'd call it: I sketched out what it would look like to follow the Psalter laid out by Benedict in his monastic Rule. If you were to follow his one-week Psalter, you'd end up praying through 40 psalms a day (19 of which are before 7am!).

This seems overwhelming to us, but Benedict reminds us that "our holy ancestors, energetic as they were, did all this in a single day. Let us hope that we, lukewarm as we are, can achieve it in a single week." Benedict's droll humor is amusing as always, but here it has a sting: the Psalter in a week? We must be tepid in the extreme: since Vatican II, devout monks and Catholics have prayed through a Four Week Psalter; and as Protestants we're lucky if we've read the Psalms in their entirety, ever.

I can't help but think that we're missing out on something deeply important here. Never having done more than the Four Week Psalter myself, it's hard to say exactly what that is, but I think Kathleen Norris points the way in her book, The Cloister Walk.

She points out that the Psalms are deeply human, while being at the same time divinely inspired. They give words to our most common experiences: joy, love, fear, doubt, loneliness, shame and hope. They assure us that God does not stand apart, uncomprehending, while we swing through the range of emotions. Rather, He is with us in our daily experience. As we become familiar with the Psalms, as they become the vocabulary by which we understand our own emotional and spiritual lives, we remember that while we are experiencing deeply human reactions, God is unflinchingly present. And this brings its own kind of hope.

Sometimes we feel that we can only end our meditations with the conviction that darkness is our only companion. That psalm always befuddled me, because it didn't transpose back into a major key at the end; it didn't resolve with faith. But sometimes that's all we can muster—an acknowledgment that we are emotionally bankrupt and cannot even lift our eyes. If left to our own devices we would surely believe that all is lost, that our doubt and fear and trembling has at last driven God away in disgust and anger. But, no: God is still there; He has seen it; He has made this experience Holy Writ. The Psalms are our guarantee in this. They recast our lives within the limits of God's Providence.

This is, to me, reason enough to desire to get the Psalms into my head and into my heart. Hopefully, lukewarm as I am, I can still manage to follow the Four-Week Psalter; but I do still envy those who can pray the Psalter in a week. Not because they are more holy—but because their eyes must see so much more clearly!

Morning Prayer

In this morning's Lauds:

Grant that what we see dimly now as in a mirror, we may come to perceive clearly in the brightness of Your truth.

commentary?

I saw this on the Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks. Commentary on secularization? Separation of Church and State? A refusal to speak the name of the Most Hight? I'm also curious what the ellipsis does to the meaning of the phrase.

new resolve

I have renewed this domain name, and renewed my commitment to blog here regularly. Not that anyone believes me on that.

I have been thinking today about the Incarnation. It must have been extraordinary to be Isaiah, and to hear from God that the fulfillment of the covenant promise—"I will be your God, and you shall be my people"—would be a person. In Isaiah 42:6, God tells His Servant, who is His Son, "I will give you as a covenant for the people, a light for the nations." Jesus Himself was the covenant promise and the mediator of the covenant.

I think we've forgotten how remarkable this is. Israel never expected it. That God would be their God in their midst meant for them only that the worship of God would be in the temple, and He would bless them. That in itself is grace! But to suggest that God would really come into the midst of His people, in human form, to be known and interacted with and loved and enjoyed directly: this was new.

Jesus is called Immanuel: God with us. Nobody saw that one coming, until God showed a dim shadow of it to Isaiah. I wonder how much he grasped what it meant.

But for us, it means that when God draws us to be His people, He is entirely reconciling us to Himself. We are made to enjoy Him up-close and nothing else will satisfy us. So the redemption of His people restores us to that direct presence.

Isn't it shocking to think that His presence showed up and wandered around Israel for 30 years, and people knew Him and talked to Him and cooked food for Him and laughed with Him? That is how God is willing to be interacted with. That should shatter a few of our pictures of Him as faraway and unapproachable.

It's also shocking to think that many Jews rejected the very covenant promise of God—that He would be their God in the midst of them—so they could pursue the temple worship, which was only a symbol of that presence. (Especially given that the shekinah glory of God had departed the temple centuries before! They were clinging to an empty shell of a shadow, when the substance stood before them!)

And shocking that we do the same thing constantly. We prefer the form of distant worship to the intimacy of God's presence in approachable friendship. And we picture interacting with God as similar to the worship we have in church today. Not to deride church services in any way, but I think we've forgotten that we gather to look forward to the fullness of promise. Church worship is an unavoidably incomplete experience, which is even more reason we should stop trying to shop for a "better" experience in worship. The best Sunday worship service will leave us longing all the more for the real thing, the full presence of God in Christ.