Friday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
October 23, 2020
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 24 which has been described as “an entrance psalm” for the Temple liturgies.
Praying Psalm 24 invites us to consider how we enter and meet God in the Holy Space of our lives.
That space, first of all, belongs to God Who created all things. We do not create it. God opens it.
The LORD’s are the earth and its fullness;
Psalm 24: 1-2
the world and those who dwell in it.
For the Lord founded it upon the seas
and established it upon the rivers.
Everything within us and around us — that “fullness” of life — belongs to God. When we acknowledge this truth in humble faith and loving awareness, we realize that we already exist within God’s sanctuary:
Who can ascend the mountain of the LORD?
Psalm 24: 3-4
or who may stand in his holy place?
The one whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean,
who desires not what is vain.
The journey of the spiritual life is about finding that still point in our souls where we see God’s Face in all things. That sacred stillness holds us in God’s Presence until we let go of ourselves within that Love. The Lord blesses that letting go with a “reward”:
That person shall receive a blessing from the LORD,
Psalm 24: 5-6
a reward from God the savior.
Such is the race that seeks the Lord,
that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.
The psalm doesn’t clearly state what that “reward” is, but I think it might be the grace, insight, passion, and courage to live as Paul describes in our first reading:
to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received,
with all humility and gentleness, with patience,
bearing with one another through love,
striving to preserve the unity of the spirit
through the bond of peace;
one Body and one Spirit,
as you were also called to the one hope of your call;
one Lord, one faith, one baptism;
one God and Father of all,
who is over all and through all and in all.
Poem: The light shouts in your tree-top, and the face
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours
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.
Music: I Have Loved You – Michael Joncas
I Have Loved You
I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine; I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine. Seek the face of the Lord and long for him: He will bring you his light and his peace. I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine; I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine. Seek the face of the Lord and long for him: He will bring you his joy and his hope. I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine; I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine. Seek the face of the Lord and long for him: He will bring you his care and his love. I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine; I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have called you and you are mine.
Lavish Mercy 