We carry ourselves wherever we go. ~Matrona 1, The Forgotten Desert Mothers by Laura Swan
The psalms had never been my favorite. For years, I found most of them repetitive, overly dramatic and a bit whiny. I found the ones attributed to David particularly annoying. After all, it seemed to me that David’s predicaments were often the natural consequences of his actions. I began to understand the psalms in a new way when I joined a discernment process to become an Oblate with the Community of Saint Mary’s Southern Province. An Oblate is a lay member of the Community who seeks to follow the Rule of Saint Benedict out in the world, an extension of the faithful practices of the monks and nuns.
Each day in this year of discernment, I read the psalms within Morning and Evening Prayer and reflected in writing on a portion of at least one psalm. After three hundred and sixty~some~odd days of this, I began to wonder if the point of the psalms wasn’t really about the ranting and the wailing, the anger or the begging. Perhaps the point was that God was with and present to the psalmists, even if they had brought their situation upon themselves.
Perhaps the revelation of the psalms is the same as that of Lent: God may not rescue us from the wilderness of our making, but God is always present to us. God is present to us in despair, anger, doubt, tears and repentance, no matter how long it takes us to get there. God is present to us when things are taking too long and when they are going too fast. God is present when we cause the trouble—and when the problem happens for no discernible reason. What if the thing we are meant to learn from the psalms and the practices of fasting, repenting and simplicity in Lent is that God, love divine, is always with us, in the pit, in the wilderness, in the fog and in the consequences?
For Reflection
People experience God’s presence differently. Some feel God’s presence as an emotion or physical sensation, and some hear or see God’s presence in nature, another person or a work of art. How do you experience God being present to you, especially in the wilderness? Do you experience it in the moment or upon reflection months or years later?
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