These now and again reflections on the psalms might be called a gloss. A dining room table, a runway model's hair, a car's wax finish can be said to be glossy. Here, a gloss is a kind of over voice which ponders the deepening spiritual meaning of the psalms for living today. But we must be prepared as the psalms are not easy listening, white bread, a walk in the park. They can take us to a place where, left to ourselves, we might prefer not to go.
Verse 1: "O Lord, you have been our refuge from one generation to the next." Ancestry/Genealogy sites are a "dime a dozen" these days. But for all the information they may yield about where we come from, do they tell a faith story? Someone or something has brought me to faith — from one generation to the next, right up to today. Do I know my faith story? And not a few of us have come to faith by way of others who were threatened because they believed. I may well have come to faith because grandparents and great grandparents (and folks before them) persevered in believing, God is my refuge.
Verse 2: "Before the mountains were born...you are God, without beginning or end." Our sense of time is tiny. As the world goes, the United States is a very young nation. We don't get high marks for knowing even the history of our own country let alone the events of the world. Still, God has been God before there were mountains; before the earth was formed. And God will be God long after our little planet wastes away (by our own doing?) and its sun burns out.
Verse 3: "You turn man back to dust..." And God is God despite our age-denying serums and surgeries. God calls the shots. It's God's call when I return to the dust. It is said that the person who will live to age one hundred and fifty, has already been born. How long do we think we can dodge death? Do I really want to live that long?
Verse 4: "To your eyes a thousand years are like yesterday, come and gone, no more than a watch in the night." That is, the way God sees things, our lives are the length of a night-shift.
Verses 5 and 6: "You sweep men away like a dream, like grass which springs up in the morning and by evening withers and fades." Tsunamis, accidents, hurricanes, tornadoes, avalanches, massacres, can sweep people away. But I don't think God is behind any of that. Much of our swift demise is our own fault. Even if climate changes are part of a natural cycle, surely how we live today is only accelerating and intensifying the changes which are bringing about the death of the world's poorest people. Put a battlefield grade weapon in the hands of a crazed 18 year old and unspeakable things may well happen. Life is fragile. We want to think we should live to a ripe old age. But there are no guarantees to that end.
Verses 7-11: "We are destroyed in your anger...who understands the power of your anger and fears the strength of your fury?" That's not a Christian view. Does God strike us down in furious anger? I don't think so. Maybe we project our own furious anger on to God. We want God to be as angry as we are. Even so, we're so enthralled with entertainment, I imagine that if God's flaming apocalyptic angel appeared over the nation's capitol to take the country in hand, there'd be people rushing out to make a video of it — a selfie with the sword-wielding angel. I've seen priests holding phone-cameras in the air during the consecration at Lourdes or at a pope's Mass. We've lost something.
Verse 12: "Make us know the shortness of our life that we may gain wisdom of heart." But are we teachable? Has there been a loss of docility? Google University. Notice the psalmist asks for wisdom of heart. Pope Francis said recently, "We're not supposed to be encyclopedias." I sense the pope was suggesting the learning we need to attend to is learning of the inner life. Soul-learning. I met a man who boasted of having read the entire eight hundred and forty eight page Catechism of the Catholic Church. When he finished his boast I asked, "And?" He had no response, as if reading that huge tome was somehow an end in itself.
Verse 13: "Lord, relent!" Some Catholics are waiting for God to do the big smack down — "Punish those who are not like me." Moscow Patriarch Kirill claims that Russia has a right to invade Ukraine because of the West's "gay parades." But it isn't that way. "Show pity to your servants." God has shown pity to the world already. God's pity is Jesus Christ. Truth be told, there are not a few Christians for whom that thought would never occur. Or they think pity means soft. God's pity is God's enduring love. Through the world's most awful sins — the sin of reducing Ukraine to dust, the sins that make for the massacre of classrooms filled with young children — God's love endures. If we think it's not possible, we might witness the enduring love of the mother whose son is on death row.
Verse 14: "In the morning, fill us with your love; we shall exult and rejoice all our days." Here, the psalmist comes around. Something shakes him out of his running resentments. "In the morning fill me with your love." That's a poetic way of saying, we are always beginning again. The manifest love of God is more meaningful than all else — it fills his days with happiness.
Verse 15: "Give us joy to balance our affliction for the years when we knew misfortune." That is, I can rehearse all the old tales, the injustices I've suffered, the failures, the slights, the stupid mistakes, the being misunderstood or cheated, the heart ache, and over all is the joy of knowing how loved I am by God. How is it that my life is of such value to God, that God would do anything (indeed, has done everything) so as not to lose me. Yet again, gratitude is the heart beat of the Christian spiritual life — not ticking off boxes on a list of right dogma, rules and ritual.
Verse 16: "Show forth your work to your servants." But showing forth God's work is what WE should be doing. The churches of North America and Europe are emptying — fast. Some Christians blame everyone and everything else for the hemorrhaging. But is there something we should have been doing all along? Some works we should have been revealing? Is there something about our own hypocrisy that has resulted in so many — especially young people — turning off? What of Christ's Gospel have we missed? Is God necessarily shown glory because we've built splendid churches? I'd suggest lives and minds, changed and transformed by Christ show forth God's work. Truth be told, Christians often think and act like everyone else. Pope Francis recently spoke of priests who live like pagans. Are the media elites the ones who really form minds in this country? Are they the new high priests?
Verse 17: "Give success to the work of our hands." That doesn't mean, "Oh God, help us win this war," as holy water is sprayed over the rockets, jets, bombs and camouflaged soldiers, or, "Oh God, help us to make the diocesan campaign a success." Rather, Oh God, that our minds would be freed of the cultural-political stupidity that is taking us down — the propaganda of advertisers and the talking TV heads who spew awful lies. Give success to our growing up. Give success to our maturing. Give success to our transformation. St. Irenaeus said, "The glory of God is the human person fully alive." Wow, what does that mean? I know someone who day-trades online, pleased to announce (fully conscious) of his war-profiteering. "Give success to the work of our hands," that is, re-create us that we would live authentic, beautiful lives, as Christ has lived his.
