Wednesday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time

July 8, 2020

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 105:2-7, a hymn to God’s omnipotent fidelity. The same hymn, with minor variations, appears in the First Book of Chronicles where it is attributed to David after the Ark of the Covenant, which had been lost during battle, was brought home to the tabernacle.

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Psalm 105 is also a companion piece to Psalm 106, the first recounting God’s wondrous mercies; the second lamenting Israel’s ungrateful response.

Our passage today is really a call to remember God’s goodness to us and to our communities.

Look to the LORD who is Strength;
seek to serve God constantly.
Remember the wondrous deeds God has wrought,
the signs, and the judgments God has spoken.

The second line here is very important. If we do remember, we will “seek to serve”, to respond by being at one (obedient) to God’s hope for us.

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As we pray today, we might want to take a walk down memory lane with God, noticing all the blessings of our lives.  We might pay particular attention to the things we once resisted which eventually proved to be disguised benedictions.

Our psalm response today reminds us that God is in everything, even those dark places where God waits to lead us through. We pray for the spiritual insight to look for God in all things.

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Poetry: The light shouts in your tree-top, and the face – Rainer Maria Rilke

The light shouts in your tree-top, and the face
of all things becomes radiant and vain;
only at dusk do they find you again.
The twilight hour, the tenderness of space,
lays on a thousand heads a thousand hands,
and strangeness grows devout where they have lain.
With this gentlest of gestures you would hold
the world, thus only and not otherwise.
You lean from out its skies to capture earth,
and feel it underneath your mantle’s folds.
You have so mild a way of being.
They
who name you loudly when they come to pray
forget your nearness. From your hands that tower
above us, mountainously, lo, there soars,
to give the law whereby our senses live,
dark-browed, your wordless power.

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Music: Remember Mercy – The Many