Vindicate me, O God, and
defend my cause
against an ungodly people,
from the deceitful and unjust
man
deliver me!
For you are the God in whom I take refuge;
why have you rejected me?
Why do I go about mourning
because of the oppression of
the enemy?
Send out your light and your truth;
let them lead me;
let them bring me to your
holy hill
and to your dwelling!
Then I will go to the altar of God,
to God my exceeding joy,
and I will praise you with
the lyre,
O God, my God.
Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil
within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation and my God.
Psalm 43
Reflection – I am back from another week
of family ministry, this time at the Nazareth
family apostolate in Quebec, slightly sunburned and with that pleasantly
exhausted feeling that comes from having spent a week doing something good for
people.
This lovely
psalm follows upon the
previous one and repeats some of the same images: ‘why do I go mourning…
why are you cast down my soul… hope in God, I shall praise him again…’ It
captures to some degree an important aspect of our experience of life in this
world. There is a certain amount of uncertainty, a certain darkness of human
experience, a certain cast-down-ness that is part of the human condition.
We simply
don’t see God and simply don’t ‘know’ Him in this life, not really. Not as we
hope to know Him in the next, anyhow. And meanwhile there are ‘ungodly people’
all about—who may be anyone who by word, deed, or omission makes the world in
which we live darker, makes it harder for us to hold onto faith, hope, love.
And at the
same time, there is this God who while shrouded in mystery is our hope and our
salvation. It is so important to realize, and the psalms help us to realize it,
that our faith in God is not some airy-fairy, pie-in-the-sky escape from
reality, but is in fact the light of hope that allows us to embrace reality in
all its roughness and sorrows. We do not flee from the difficult and painful
parts of life into a fantasy world of ‘me-and-Jesus’. Rather, Jesus and His
Father empower us by the gift of the Holy Spirit to confront everything in the
world, and everything in our hearts (which is even harder) that opposes light
and love and bring the light and truth of God to bear on it.
Psalm 43 is
a battle psalm, a psalm that is taken right from the daily experience of a
person of faith living in a world without faith. And it does acknowledge that
in the midst of the battle we need help from on high. ‘Send forth your light
and your truth’. It is the truth of God, given to us above all in the words of
the Gospel, that is our light on the path, that is the sure guide showing us
how to get to that altar of God which is our joy in this world and the next.
That is
significant, too. Our joy, salvation, deliverance, is found in coming to the
altar of God. This is something I am exploring at length and (hopefully) in depth
in my Thursday commentary on the Mass. We are made for the worship of God, and
to enter that act of worship in Christ is the deepest fulfillment of our
humanity, and indeed the very entry of the human person into the life of the
Trinity.
Meanwhile, we carry on and do the best we can under battle conditions. Turmoil without and turmoil within, and yet always looking for that bit of light, that bit of truth that will see us through whatever the current struggle is to the next place of calm and freedom where we can take up the lyre and strum another psalm or two to the God who saves us. And that is our task this day, to look for the light, weather the storm, and praise the Lord for all things.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.