Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 80 which calls upon God to “rouse” – to wake up, to look toward us from heaven, and to take care of us. Perhaps the psalm calls us to wake too????
O shepherd of Israel, hearken, From your throne upon the cherubim, shine forth. Rouse your power. Once again, O LORD of hosts, look down from heaven, and see; Take care of this vine, and protect what your right hand has planted the we whom you yourself made strong.
Psalm 80: 2-3;15-16
Our Gospel places us with Jesus, as he descends the mountain after the Transfiguration.
He speaks about two great prophets – Elijah and John the Baptist:
Elijah – the fiery reformer who “turned back hearts” to the day of the Lord
John – who cried out in the desert, “Prepare the way of the Lord!”
These prophets open the door to our final approach to Christmas – our last few days to heed their advice and ready our hearts for the awesome, yet humble, coming of Christ.
Is there anything in my heart that needs to be turned back to God — any energy, dedication or insight that has shifted from God’s Way to my own selfish way?
Is there anything I must prepare so that my life is ready to receive Christ?
These are the questions Elijah and John offer us today.. Praying Psalm 80, we might ask that God care for us and show us the way to the Christmas Light.
Poetry: The God We Hardly Knew – Saint Oscar Romero
No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor.
The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything, look down on others, those who have no need even of God – for them there will be no Christmas.
Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God. Emmanuel. God-with-us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God.
Music: Prepare the Way, O Zion – Fernando Ortega (Lyrics below)
Prepare the way O Zion Your Christ is drawing near Let every hill and valley A level way appear Greet One who comes in glory Foretold in sacred story
Chorus: O blest is Christ that came In God’s most holy name Christ brings God’s rule O Zion He comes from heaven above His rule is peace and freedom And justice truth and love Lift high your praise resounding For grace and joy abounding
Fling wide your gates, O Zion Your Savior’s rule embrace And tidings of salvation Proclaim in every place All lands will bow rejoicing Their adoration voicing
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 94 which assures us of God’s patient and enduring love.
Happy are they whom you instruct, O Lord! whom you teach out of your law; to give them rest in evil days… For you will not abandon your beloved, nor will you forsake your own.
Psalm 94: 12-14
How does God instruct us in this perfect Law? Our Alleluia Verse offers this insight:
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, For I am meek and humble of heart.
Matthew 11:29
By imitating the humble love of Jesus, we learn to become more like God in whose image we are created.
Deepening in that imitative love is a lifelong journey. Sometimes, maybe often, our footing is unsure. Sometimes we even fall flat on our face!
The psalmist tells us we are not alone in the struggle, a verse we might repeat when we are a bit off spiritual balance:
Were not the LORD my help, my soul would soon dwell in the silent grave. When I say, “My foot is slipping,” your mercy, O LORD, sustains me.
Psalm 94: 17-18
Poetry: Prayer of the Tightrope Dancer – Sister Eleanor Fitzgibbons, IHM
Oh God of tenderness and watchful love, You are my balance beam, I shall not falter. With you, my surety, I will not fail.
Music: Two songs today
Blessed Assurance – written in 1883 by Fanny Crosby an amazing creative talent and activist. She was blind from infancy.
For my fellow tightrope walkers out there: Walk-in’ the Tightrope: Some of you might like this rockin’ song from Stevie Ray Vaughn to kick up your Saturday 😉
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 13, a powerful lesson in prayer.
The psalm is one of my favorites because it feels so “real”. The one who prays, presumably David, needs an answer to his prayer- and is not perceiving one. (emphasis on “perceiving”)
So the psalmist sounds a bit like someone desperately calling customer service to see why a life-saving order has not arrived😉:
How long, LORD? Will you utterly forget me? How long will you hide your face from me? .. Look, answer me, O LORD, my God! Give light to my eyes that I may not sleep in death
Psalm 13: 2, 4
But as the psalmist continues to pray, an evolution of grace and understanding occurs. There is a realization that the kind of answer expected is one according to human measurement … one that will make the pray-er look triumphant in the eyes of his enemies:
Answer me, Lord my God … Lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed,” lest my foes rejoice at my downfall.
Psalm 13: 4-5
But the depth of our relationship with God is not determined by what our enemies think … or even our friends. That sacred relationship is rooted in our grateful recognition and trusting immersion in God’s ever-present mercy and love for us:
But I trust in your mercy. Grant my heart joy in your salvation, I will sing to the LORD, Who has dealt bountifully with me!
Psalm 13: 6-7
God always answers us. We may not have the capacity to perceive the answer because it is not the one we expected or wished for. But the truth is that through whatever “answer” unfolds to our prayer, God is leading us deeper into God’s heart.
Can we trust that? Can we yield to it? That is the “salvation” the psalmist ultimately prays for:
Sometimes we might hear a person say that they don’t know how to get started talking with God in prayer. They seem to feel it’s kind of like a blind date where you end up realizing you have nothing in common with each other.
Paul – in our reading from Romans says – no, wait a minute. God is already within you simply by the nature of your creaturehood. You are made of the very stuff of God. In fact, the Spirit of God deep within our souls is like the fiery magma from a volcano. It erupts from our love and prays for us to the Creator – if we will only let it.
Poetry: Praying by Mary Oliver
It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.
Music: Spirit Seeking Light and Beauty – by Janet Erskine Stuart, interpreted here by the Daughters of St. Paul (Lyrics below)
Spirit seeking light and beauty, Heart still longing for your rest In your search for understanding, Only thus can you be blest,
Through the vastness of creation, Though your restless thought may roam, God is all that you can long for, God is all creation’s home.
Taste and see God, feel and hear God, Hope and grasp the unseen hand; Though the darkness seem to hide you, Faith and love can understand.
Loving Wisdom, guiding Spirit, All our hearts are made anew. Lead us through the land of shadows ‘Til we come to rest in you.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 24 in which the psalmist expresses the heart’s deep longing for God:
Who can ascend the mountain of the LORD? or who may stand in that holy place? The one whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain. Who shall receive a blessing from the LORD, a reward from God the savior. Such is the race that seeks for God, that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.
Psalm 24: 5-6
But achieving those sinless hands and clean heart is not always an easy task. It takes a life focused on faith and rooted in love.
Jesus talks about that focus in today’s Gospel.
Jesus gives us a parable which, at first, appears to say, “Get your act together fast, or God might zap you.” From Jesus’s words, we can assume that some public disasters have recently occurred. Those in the gathered crowd are unnerved by these events.
Jesus uses that nervousness to talk about repentance. He tells the people that tragedy can make us wake up to the fact that life is fragile and fleeting. That awareness should make us want to use our time on earth well, to give glory to God.
The repentance Jesus encourages is not just a contrition, or turning from sin. It is an opening of the soul’s eyes to see our lives and circumstances as God sees them.
Is God going to zap us if we don’t have that kind of repentance? No, I think not.
God is always Mercy … always, always Mercy.
With the parable of the fruitless fig tree, Jesus assures us that God is with us, giving us every grace and opportunity to bear spiritual fruit. God is patient and nurturing. But, in every human life, there is a limit to the time we have to respond.
Poetry: The Facts of Life – Pádraig Ó Tuama
That you were born and you will die.
That you will sometimes love enough and sometimes not.
That you will lie if only to yourself.
That you will get tired.
That you will learn most from the situations you did not choose.
That there will be some things that move you more than you can say.
That you will live that you must be loved.
That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention.
That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg of two people who once were strangers and may well still be.
That life isn’t fair. That life is sometimes good and sometimes better than good.
That life is often not so good.
That life is real and if you can survive it, well, survive it well with love and art and meaning given where meaning’s scarce.
That you will learn to live with regret. That you will learn to live with respect.
That the structures that constrict you may not be permanently constricting.
That you will probably be okay.
That you must accept change before you die but you will die anyway.
So you might as well live and you might as well love. You might as well love. You might as well love.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 119, the longest and very familiar psalm which pleads for God to mercifully teach us:
Wisdom
Knowledge
Goodness
Generosity
Kindness
Compassion
In our readings, Paul asserts that without God’s Grace we can never attain these gifts. Jesus calls us to use these gifts and to practice a holy life by recognizing and responding justly to the challenges of our times.
Paul sounds a lot like someone approaching the microphone at “Sinners Anonymous”:
I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.
Romans 7:18-20
Paul basically attests to the fact that for human beings, even him, will and actions often don’t synch up. Sure, we want to be good people, but as Nike says, do we …
Paul’s says no. The only way we do the good we will to do is by the grace of Jesus Christ.
In our Gospel, Jesus affirms the slowness of the human spirit to act on the realities around us. In some translations, Jesus uses a phrase which caught on with the architects of Vatican II: the signs of the times.
Jesus tells his listeners and us that we need to be alert to the circumstances of our world. It both weeps and rejoices. Where it weeps, we must be a source of mercy and healing. Where it rejoices, we must foster and celebrate the Presence of the Spirit.
In the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes (The Church in the Modern World), we read:
In every age, the church carries the responsibility of reading the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel, if it is to carry out its task. In language intelligible to every generation, it should be able to answer the ever recurring questions which people ask about the meaning of this present life and of the life to come, and how one is related to the other. We must be aware of and understand the aspirations, the yearnings, and the often dramatic features of the world in which we live.
Although written in the 1960s, these powerful words hold true today. We are the Church of which the document speaks. We are the ones whom Jesus calls to respond with authentic justice and mercy to the signs of the times.
Read the newspaper in that light today. Watch the news in that light. Meet your brothers and sisters in that light today.
Poetry: Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Perhaps more than anything else, Shelley wanted his message of reform and revolution spread, and the wind becomes the symbol for spreading the word of change through the poet-prophet figure. Some also believe that the poem was written in response to the loss of his son William in 1819 (born to Mary Shelley – author of “Frankenstein”). The ensuing pain influenced Shelley. The poem allegorizes the role of the poet as the voice of change and revolution. (Wikipedia)
I
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!
II
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion, Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith’s height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!
III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Music: The Times They Are A’changin’ – Bob Dylan
Dylan’s songs in the 50s and 60s became anthems for the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. His lyrics during this period incorporated a wide range of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defied popular music conventions and appealed to the burgeoning counterculture. (Wikipedia)
Ah, it was a good time to be young! (me)
The Swedish Academy awarded Dylan the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 1 which promises that, if we walk in faith, we will prevail against any evil.
Blessed the one who follows not the counsel of the wicked Nor walks in the way of sinners, nor sits in the company of the insolent, But delights in the law of the LORD and meditates on the law day and night.
Psalm 1: 1-3
The passage from Romans and our Gospel preach, in no uncertain terms, that we must choose good over evil.
In our Gospel, Jesus says he has come to set fire on the earth! He says that, because of him, there will not be peace but division, setting households against one another.
It’s not a comforting Gospel.
And guess what, we don’t live in a comforting world do we? We see human beings set against each other in war, political corruption, economic despoiling, human trafficking, ecological crime and other deeply ingrained systemic abuses.
Pope John Paul II in his encyclical EVANGELIUM VITAE refers to these realities as a “culture of death”.
Some threats come from nature itself, but they are made worse by the culpable indifference and negligence of those who could in some cases remedy them. Others are the result of situations of violence, hatred and conflicting interests, which lead people to attack others through murder, war, slaughter and genocide.
And how can we fail to consider the violence against life done to millions of human beings, especially children, who are forced into poverty, malnutrition and hunger because of an unjust distribution of resources between peoples and between social classes? And what of the violence inherent not only in wars as such but in the scandalous arms trade, which spawns the many armed conflicts which stain our world with blood? What of the spreading of death caused by reckless tampering with the world’s ecological balance, by the criminal spread of drugs, or by the promotion of certain kinds of sexual activity which, besides being morally unacceptable, also involve grave risks to life? It is impossible to catalogue completely the vast array of threats to human life, so many are the forms, whether explicit or hidden, in which they appear today!
Paul says that, through our Baptism, we are called and strengthened to bear witness against such a culture:
But now that you have been freed from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit that you have leads to sanctification, and its end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Every day, each one of us has the opportunity to stand up for mercy and justice by the choices we make, by the attitudes we affirm, by the values we stand for. But sometimes it’s hard, because it can set us against some of the people around and close to us. That’s when the rubber meets the road!
Poetry: The Onset by Robert Frost
In his poem, Frost is realistic about the onset of winter, at first comparing it to a death of someone who has failed to prevail against evil. But then he places winter in the whole cycle of the seasons and finds hope in the promise of spring.
Always the same, when on a fated night At last the gathered snow lets down as white As may be in dark woods, and with a song It shall not make again all winter long Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground, I almost stumble looking up and round, As one who overtaken by the end Gives up his errand, and lets death descend Upon him where he is, with nothing done To evil, no important triumph won, More than if life had never been begun.
Yet all the precedent is on my side: I know that winter death has never tried The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap In long storms an undrifted four feet deep As measured again maple, birch, and oak, It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak; And I shall see the snow all go down hill In water of a slender April rill That flashes tail through last year’s withered brake And dead weeds, like a disappearing snake. Nothing will be left white but here a birch, And there a clump of houses with a church.
October 20, 2021 Wednesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 124, a dramatic psalm stretched between early desperation and ultimate freedom.
In the psalmist’s prayer, Israel is called to realize that it has narrowly escaped from a mortal danger, never specified, but only alluded to in phrases such as:
would have swallowed us alive
fury was inflamed against us
waters have overwhelmed us
torrent swept over us
swept over by the raging waters
not leave us a prey to their teeth
This is some serious trouble! And because of this blessed escape, the community is called to a life of freely given service and praise.
In our readings, Paul and Jesus both instruct and challenge their listeners and us to a similar response for all the graces we have received – especially being rescued from sin in the life-saving waters of Baptism.
Paul wants us to understand that, through our Baptism, we are living in a whole new power for goodness and grace. The world may look the same as it did before we belonged to Christ, but it isn’t.
To use a phrase from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
If we see with the new eyes of grace, we will be able to respond to Jesus’s challenge:
Stay awake! For you do not know when the Son of Man will come.
Stay awake. See the world and life as they truly are – places where God awaits us in every moment. This is the amazing power we have received through our Baptism!
So let’s open our hearts to listen lovingly to the sound of the Holy Spirit in our lives. That freed and obedient heart is precious to God, and is the catalyst to a transformed life!
Poetry: Song for Autumn – Mary Oliver
In the deep fall don’t you imagine the leaves think how comfortable it will be to touch the earth instead of the nothingness of air and the endless freshets of wind? And don’t you think the trees themselves, especially those with mossy, warm caves, begin to think of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep inside their bodies? And don’t you hear the goldenrod whispering goodbye, the everlasting being crowned with the first tuffets of snow? The pond vanishes, and the white field over which the fox runs so quickly brings out its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its bellows. And at evening especially, the piled firewood shifts a little, longing to be on its way.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 130 which promises that, even when we are in the depths, God offers us “the fullness of redemption”.
Let Israel hope in the LORD, For with the LORD is mercy, and plenteous redemption.
Psalm 130:7
For Paul in our first reading today, who is preaching a universal salvation in Jesus Christ, those “depths” are sin:
For there is no distinction; (between Jew and Gentile) all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God.
Romans 3:2-24
Paul then declares a core teaching of the New Covenant
They are justified freely by God’s grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus…
Romans 3:24
Paul is preaching to a community in which a few “boasters” have surfaced – people who felt they could reinterpret and codify the Gospel their own way – like the Pharisees and lawyers do with the Mosaic Law in our reading from Luke today .
Paul is correcting that falsehood. He uses a lot of words to explicate the Gospel’s core tenet of universal redemption by grace. But for me, they are “theology words” not “prayer words”.
What I choose to pray with is this awesome truth:
God loves me so much as to redeem me from the depths of spiritual alienation through the Gift of Jesus Christ.
The people in today’s Gospel refused to recognize and accept that all-defining gift. If they had, everything about their lives would have been transformed. And worse yet, by their exalted positions as scholars and leaders, they used their power to block others from learning about and receiving this Transcendent Grace.
In every generation, there are “religionists” who decide what elements of doctrine satisfy their own needs and desires. They preach that fragmented and divisive catechism to advance their self-serving agendas. They design laws which inhibit rather than assist people in opening their spirits to God’s merciful fullness.
Our readings today call us rise from the depths of any such inhibitions:
to cherish the gift of our redemption in Christ
to meditate on and educate ourselves in a true understanding of that gift
to test ourselves for an honest and inclusive faith rooted in the righteousness of God
Now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, though testified to by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.
Romans 3:21
Poetry: CONSUMED IN GRACE – Catherine of Siena From ‘Love Poems From God‘ by Daniel Ladinsky.
I first saw God when I was a child, six years of age. the cheeks of the sun were pale before Him, and the earth acted as a shy girl, like me. Divine light entered my heart from His love that did never fully wane, though indeed, dear, I can understand how a person’s faith can at time flicker, for what is the mind to do with something that becomes the mind’s ruin: a God that consumes us in His grace. I have seen what you want; it is there, a Beloved of infinite tenderness.
Music: Amazing Grace – written by John Newton, sung by Il Divo
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 86 which, following our first reading about vindictive Jonah, shows us a heart converted to mercy.
These readings are so powerful. I think a little “Jonah” lives in most of us – that part of us that wants “them” to get what they deserve. We can’t quite get ourselves to want “them”, instead, to receive the unmerited mercy of God.
In our first reading, God tries to help stingy-hearted Jonah face his unforgiveness toward the Ninevites.
Our psalm, on the other hand, is prayed by a humble servant who understands forgiveness because they need it themselves.
Have mercy on me, O Lord, for to you I call all the day. Gladden the soul of your servant, for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in kindness to all who call upon you. Hearken, O LORD, to my prayer and attend to the sound of my pleading.
Psalm 86: 3-6
Psalm 86 invites us to grow in our spiritual life in two ways:
to recognize our need for forgiveness because we are not without sin
to extend that forgiving desire to those who have sinned against us
It is the lesson Jesus affirms in today’s Gospel:
Jesus said to them, “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us, and do not subject us to the final test.”
Poetry: Forgiveness – John Greenleaf Whittier
My heart was heavy, for its trust had been Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong; So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men, One summer Sabbath day I strolled among The green mounds of the village burial-place; Where, pondering how all human love and hate Find one sad level; and how, soon or late, Wronged and wrongdoer, each with meekened face, And cold hands folded over a still heart, Pass the green threshold of our common grave, Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart, Awed for myself, and pitying my race, Our common sorrow, like a mighty wave, Swept all my pride away, and trembling I forgave!
Music: Lord, Teach Us to Pray – Joe Wise
Lord, teach us to pray…
It’s been a long and cold December kind of day. With our hearts and hands all busy in our private little wars. We stand and watch each other now from separate shores. We lose the way.
I need to know today the way things should be in my head. I need to know for once now the things that should be said. I’ve got to learn to walk around as if I were not dead. I’ve got to find a way to learn to live. (Refrain)
I still get so distracted by the color of my skin. I still get so upset now when I find that I don’t win. I meet so many strangers—I’m slow to take them in. I’ve got to find a way to really live. (Refrain)
I stand so safe and sterile as I watch a man fall flat. I’m silent with a man who’d like to know just where I’m at. With the aged and the lonely I can barely tip my hat. I need to see the sin of “I don’t care.” (Refrain)
I stand so smug and sure before the people I’ve out-guessed. To let a man be who he is I still see as a test. And when it all comes down to “must,” I’m sure my way is best. I’ve got to find what “room” means in my heart. (Refrain)
Lord, teach us to pray. We believe that we can find a better way. Teach us to pray. We lose the way. Teach us to pray.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 102 which, together with our first reading from Zechariah, paints a picture of enduring love and hope:
the desperate yet hopeful prayer of one overwhelmed by life
Let this be written for the generation to come, and let future creatures praise the Lord: “The LORD looked down from the holy height, from heaven beheld the earth, To hear the groaning of the prisoners, to release those doomed to die.”
Psalm 102: 19-21
2. the response of a faithful God, overwhelmed by love
Thus says the LORD of hosts: I am intensely jealous for Zion, stirred to jealous wrath for her. Thus says the LORD: I will return to Zion, and I will dwell within Jerusalem; Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city, and the mountain of the LORD of hosts, the holy mountain.
Zechariah 8:1-3
The “jealous love” described here is an infinite and divine Love – the only Love entitled to be possessive because It has created us.
It is a jealousy unlike our human pettiness, rooted instead in God’s desire for our free response to the gift of our creation.
God loves us so much as to continually bring us home to Love despite any detours we take.
Lo, I will rescue my people from the land of the rising sun, and from the land of the setting sun. I will bring them back to dwell within Jerusalem. They shall be my people, and I will be their God, with faithfulness and justice.
Zechariah 8:8
In our prayer today, we might allow ourselves to be aware of God’s “jealousy” for us throughout our lives, never giving up on turning us toward Love – even when the turning may have been “like a hurricane”.
Poetry: GOD OF SHELTER, GOD OF SHADE (ISAIAH 4:6) by Irene Zimmerman, OSF
God of shelter from the rain,
God of shade from the heat,
I run from You
through the muddy street
of my uncommitted heart
till wild winds beat
against my doors,
blasting sand
through all my walls,
and I stand
without retreat,
hear Your command
to be the wheat.
Sweet the giving!
Sweet this land!
God of shelter from the rain.
God of shade from the heat.
Lavish Mercy 