The Bigger Part of Reality

Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion;

and to you shall vows be performed, O you who answer prayer!

To you all flesh shall come.

When deeds of iniquity overwhelm us, you forgive our transgressions.

Happy are those whom you choose and bring near to live in your courts.

We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, your holy temple.

By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance, O God of our salvation;

you are the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas.

By your strength you established the mountains; you are girded with might.

You silence the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves,

the tumult of the peoples.

Those who live at earth’s farthest bounds are awed by your signs;

you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy.

You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it;

the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain,

for so you have prepared it.

You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges,

softening it with showers, and blessing its growth.

You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with richness.

The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy,

the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain,

they shout and sing together for joy.

Psalm 65

Reflection – Well, after many, many weeks of a certain kind of psalm—the ‘our enemies are pursuing us to destroy us – help!’ genre, we now have something completely different. Psalm 65 is a psalm of unadulterated praise and thanksgiving, one of the truly great ones on that theme.

It is of course a harvest psalm – the pastures are overflowing and the meadows are clothed with flocks, the valleys with grain. God’s absolute mastery over nature (establishing the mountains, silencing the seas) means that when nature is doing what nature does—multiplying with fecundity so that there is abundant food to be had—it is to God that we render our thanks.

In Madonna House, especially in Combermere here, we are an agricultural people, and so it is easy for us to make this psalm our own. We know very well, as any farmers do, that all the hard work and wise husbandry of soil and seed, flock and herd, can all go for naught if killing frost or withering drought come at the wrong time. So we know that ‘if the Lord does not build the house’ (the field, the barn, the apiary, the bush lot), then ‘in vain do the builders labor’.

In our rural and agricultural context, giving thanks to God is natural, spontaneous, the obvious thing to do. But what about all you city dwellers? Leaving aside the fact that most of you probably ate food today, and that food was probably not grown in a laboratory on the international space station, so somewhere in there a farmer was involved.

But it is true that once you are, like most people in North America, two or three or ten steps removed from the earth (which I personally believe to be one of the root mistakes we have made in our modern society), then the natural awareness that all life is from God and nurtured by God becomes a bit… tenuous, shall we say?

Well, thanksgiving may not flow as obviously or spontaneously, but it should still flow. Look around you, wherever you are now. There is a sky above you, a sun and clouds, moon and stars. There is ground beneath you, even if it covered with asphalt and pavement. There are trees and birds and animals, plants and flowers. And there are people—millions upon millions of them. Each made by God, each a unique reflection of divine life and love. Even the ones who may be distressing you or may be living disastrously bad lives—even them.

All is from God, all comes from His hands and is desired and meant by Him to be used (in the case of things) for the service of love or to be receivers and givers (in the case of persons) of love. The divine bounty flows and flows and overflows, yes, even in the heart of the urban landscape, there are meadows brimming with flowers, pastures decked with flocks, granaries filled with wheat. If we have eyes to see them.

Thanksgiving situates us in the heart of reality, in the largest part of ‘what is’, rather than the narrow confines of ‘what is not’. There is an entire cosmos that simply is—only a small portion of that cosmos that tragically is not. When we burst out in grateful praise and prayer, we are choosing to live in reality, the biggest part of reality, rather than continually placing ourselves in the wound, in the unreality of creation’s incompleteness and brokenness.

Psalm 65 is a grand psalm, then, for all of us, farmers or not, to dwell in the courts of God, His holy temple, which ultimately is the entire heavens and the earth and all that fills them, filled by our Father in heaven out of His love for us and all creation.

In The Thick of the Battle

Give ear to my prayer, O God; do not hide yourself from my supplication.

Attend to me, and answer me; I am troubled in my complaint.

I am distraught by the noise of the enemy, because of the clamor of the wicked.

For they bring trouble upon me, and in anger they cherish enmity against me.

My heart is in anguish within me, the terrors of death have fallen upon me.

Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me.

And I say, “O that I had wings like a dove!

I would fly away and be at rest;  truly, I would flee far away;

I would lodge in the wilderness; I would hurry to find a shelter for myself

from the raging wind and tempest…”

It is not enemies who taunt me—I could bear that;

it is not adversaries who deal insolently with me—I could hide from them.

But it is you, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend,

with whom I kept pleasant company;

we walked in the house of God with the throng…

But I call upon God, and the Lord will save me.

Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan,

and he will hear my voice.

He will redeem me unharmed from the battle that I wage,

for many are arrayed against me.

God, who is enthroned from of old, will hear, and will humble them—

because they do not change, and do not fear God…

Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you;

he will never permit the righteous to be moved.

But you, O God, will cast them down into the lowest pit;

the bloodthirsty and treacherous shall not live out half their days.

But I will trust in you.

Psalm 55

Reflection – The Weekly Psalter – now moved to Friday because of my changed schedule – continues on its grim march through the ‘gloomy 50s’ – a section of the psalter that is marked by continuous laments over human perfidy and wickedness and injustice.

I gotta say, none of these psalms come particularly naturally to me. I am both blessed with a fundamentally cheerful disposition (well, most of the time) and have also been blessed with truly a beautiful life. That could all change tomorrow, of course, and I’m not saying nothing bad has ever happened to me (that would be weird! And untrue!). But, honestly, I have not lived my life ringed round by enemies and continually beset by wicked men.

Someone was just asking me yesterday how to pray the psalms, since that person found himself in the same position as me. Not quite personally engaged with sentiments such as we find in Psalm 55. The answer is that we need to pray these psalms along two lines. 

First, as an intercessory prayer for precisely those people who are in this situation. The suffering people of the Middle East can (and maybe some of them do) pray Psalm 55 as an almost eerily precise description of their lives now. Especially this aspect of betrayal by former friends—the inflaming of religious hatred has pitted neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend.

Just because the clamor of the wicked and the terrors of death are not all about us right now, today, they are indeed about many millions of our brothers and sisters in Christ (and our brother and sister Muslims, too), and we can surely spare them a psalm or two, right?

Even deeper, though, is that while the emotional experience of this psalm is probably not ours today (although who knows who reads this blog? Maybe you’re exactly experiencing this today. I’m so sorry, if so.), but the objective reality of this psalm very much is ours every day.

Know it or not, we are surrounded by enemies. Know it or not, there is a mortal battle raging around us. Know it or not, we are indeed needing to cry out to the Lord for deliverance and succor. As one of our wise elder MH priests (since gone to rest) used to say, “If you don’t know you’re in a battle, you’re probably losing!”

So all of these psalms (which admittedly, we don’t much care to pray, and probably are not our go-to place, psalm-wise), are a great check on our complacency, our easy assumption that life is OK, we’re OK, all is good and that we have nothing much to worry about. We have nothing to worry about, but that’s because the victory belongs to Christ and all our trust is in Him, not because we’re sitting pretty while the world goes to hell in a handcart.

No, we are beset, we are besieged, we are beleaguered. And we need to know that. And cry out to God. And know that He is all-in-all and He is stronger than all the wickedness and evil in the world. And that He is taking care of us, and of all the people suffering terribly in our times, and taking care of the evildoers, too. How? When? That’s for Him to say and ours to trust. 

And ours to keep praying for the whole world and its terrible racking and rocking with evil and chaos and violence and hatred. We have to be right in the thick of the battle, right in the heart of all of that, wherever and however God has placed us on the field… and trusting in God through it all. And that’s the life of a Christian disciple.

Looking In Triumph Over Our Foes

Save me, O God, by your name,

and vindicate me by your might.

Hear my prayer, O God;

give ear to the words of my mouth.

For the insolent have risen against me,

the ruthless seek my life;

they do not set God before them.

But surely, God is my helper;

the Lord is the upholder of my life.

He will repay my enemies for their evil.

In your faithfulness, put an end to them.

With a freewill offering I will sacrifice to you;

I will give thanks to your name, O Lord, for it is good.

For he has delivered me from every trouble,

and my eye has looked in triumph on my enemies.

Psalm 54

Reflection – The Monday Psalter continues its tour through the ‘gloomy 50s’ – this portion of the book of psalms focuses with pretty much laser focus on the enemies of the psalmist, their wickedness, the harm they have done to him, and the surety with which God will punish them and deliver him.

In other words, all the things that we try not to make the main focus of our own spiritual lives! Generally speaking, as a spiritual director, I try to steer people away from this kind of obsessive stewing over injuries and God’s punishments of those who deal them out. It doesn’t seem to be the healthiest and most peaceful way to live one’s life.

Nevertheless, here we are. We are never given any specific information about the sufferings of the psalmist; it must have been severe, given the extremity of response we read in the psalms. And it seems that one of the first lessons we are to take from this kind of psalm in general is that, while an exclusive focus on this aspect of life is unhealthy and embittering, we do need to have room for it somewhere, somehow, as needed. Bad things do happen; there is wickedness, harm, evil; we have to be able to lament and grieve over it and cry out to God for deliverance.

What is this deliverance, then? For the psalmist, it almost certainly was understood in worldly terms. They lose, I win! Simple, right? For Christians, we may be inclined to pray this psalm in entirely unworldly terms. I go to heaven, they go the other place. In other words, they lose, big time, and I WIN!!! Simpler yet, right?

While any old thing might happen in this world and the spinning of the wheel fortune (non-game-show version) is unpredictable, and furthermore the questions of eternal reward and punishment are strictly and utterly above my pay grade and so I will not address them here or elsewhere, I think there is yet another way to look at this question of God’s deliverance.

We may indeed ‘win’, either by coming out on top of whatever situation we find ourselves oppressed by, or (please God!) by ultimately getting to heaven. But there is another deliverance the Lord wants to give us in this life that I think has its own depth and import. Someone yesterday was quoting to me from the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman living in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation. She would indeed ultimately die in the Holocaust.

In the diary entry the person was telling me about, she describes living in Amsterdam under the German occupation. She is surrounded by the signs of anti-semitic violence and threat. Signs proclaiming ‘Jews and Dogs not allowed’, swastikas, and so forth. The tides of hatred against her and her people are rising. It is a situation of mortal peril and profound ugliness, evil, brutality.

Her own ‘victory over her enemies’ at that point was her realization that interiorly, she was free. She did not need to allow her enemies’ hatred to become hers. She did not need to allow fear, hopelessness, anger, and the host of other emotional and spiritual responses to be the master of her. And this was, at least in that moment, that period of her life, a great victory for her. Evil is evil, and it is a terrible ugly thing; it does not have to have the last word for us.

Hillesum, living confronted by an extremity of evil, is one thing. For us living in a world where perhaps we are not yet faced with such an enormity as the Nazi movement, we are called even more so to that space of interior freedom. There is terrible evil in the world, and I won’t bother listing it all off here – we all have our lists. But we do not need to allow that evil to become our master, to let anger, fear, despair, sorrow, vengeance be our dominating realities.

Interior freedom, the choice to live in the light, in hope, in peace, and in joy, and in love—this is the here and now victory over our enemies. Your interior castle is your own, and no matter what battles are raging against you outside it, the keep is secure, the citadel stands. With Jesus’ help, the citadel stands. So let us hold our heads high and look in triumph over whatever foes we have – not with arrogance and vindictiveness, but with faith, hope, and love today.

P.S. For those who are my regular faithful readers, the Monday Psalter will be transforming into the Friday Psalter as of next week, as my regular poustinia day is shifting from Friday to Monday.

There Is No God

Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”

They are corrupt, they commit abominable acts;

there is no one who does good.

God looks down from heaven on humankind

to see if there are any who are wise,

who seek after God.

They have all fallen away, they are all alike perverse;

there is no one who does good, no, not one.

Have they no knowledge, those evildoers,

who eat up my people as they eat bread,

and do not call upon God?

There they shall be in great terror,

in terror such as has not been.

For God will scatter the bones of the ungodly;

they will be put to shame, for God has rejected them.

O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion!

When God restores the fortunes of his people,

Jacob will rejoice; Israel will be glad.

Psalm 53

Reflection – Well, we’re heading into a bumpy patch of road on the Monday Psalter, that’s for sure. If you look ahead at the next bunch of psalms (as I did on my poustinia day last Friday) you will see that the 50s find the psalmist in a pretty sour mood, pretty darned beleaguered, pretty unhappy with humanity in general.

While none of us would want to live in the world of Psalm 53 ff., I suppose few of us have wholly avoided these moments in our life. ‘You’re all a bunch of idiots! The whole world is insane! It’s all going to hell in a handbasket!’ And so on. And so forth. My own country is having a federal election today, and I have been lamenting in various virtual and real world conversations the real lack of any good outcome. Lots of fools, for sure, but very few indeed who are ‘wise, who seek after God.’

It is this whole business of saying in one’s heart ‘there is no God’ that is the root of all our human folly. And I am not thinking here of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens (RIP) and the like, although certainly they are part of it. I’m thinking of myself, and you. But mostly me.

Folly is living as if God does not exist, and a person can be going to church twice daily and living a life that seems to be all about God one way or another (I don’t personally have too much else going on in my life)… and yet, that folly persists.

The folly of not praying in the face of a difficult situation. The folly of thinking it’s all on us and our intellects to figure things out, that God has no help for us, the Spirit no guidance to offer us. The folly of maintaining a stubborn little corner of autonomy, that one place in our life where we erect a pathetic little sign, ‘No Trespassers – And God, That Means You!’

The folly of investing our value, our sense of self, our meaning, purpose, happiness, life goal and life project in creatures, one way or another, rather than in the Creator and our communion with Him. The folly of living as if this world and what is in it is all that there is, and there is no world to come, no gravitational pull of not just our own life, but the whole life of the cosmos, towards the future kingdom of God. The folly of thinking that there is anything whatsoever in this world worth giving a particle of energy towards besides loving God with all our heart, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.

All of that is the practical atheism of the heart, the folly that none of us can safely claim we are wholly free from. And it is out of this that all the gross and subtle forms of foolish choices, disastrous mistakes, bad ideas come from. And worse yet, the horrific evils that ‘eat up people’, that cause the actual destruction of human lives—tragedies of abortion, terrorism, addictions, cruel economic exploitation and greed.

In all of this—and this will come up in every one of these psalms over the next week, after surveying the landscape of human failure and wickedness, the psalmist turns his eyes to God with a simple plea for deliverance and merciful redemption. And this is always our resting place, no matter how we’re doing or how we’re feeling about the human scene and its various follies, and our own. ‘O that God would speedily deliver us – Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy!’ That’s the ticket. In fact, that is wisdom itself – the turning of the human mind and heart heaven-ward to receive the grace that comes from above, so that He may show us the way forward through the folly of the world into the kingdom of the wise and the true.