Psalm 112, sung
Welcome to Brothers and Sisters, the weekly meet-up for prayer* and community at Daily Kos. We put an asterisk on pray* to acknowledge that not everyone uses conventional religious language, but may want to share joys and concerns, or simply take solace in a meditative atmosphere. Anyone who comes in the spirit of mutual respect, warmth and healing, is welcome.
Psalm 112, text
Happy is the one who fears the Almighty,
who is ardently devoted to God's commandments.
His descendants will be mighty in the land,
a blessed generation of upright people.
Wealth and riches are in his house,
and his beneficence lasts forever.
A light shines for the upright in the darkness;
He is gracious, compassionate, and beneficent.
All goes well with the man who lends generously,
who conducts his affairs with equity.
She shall never be shaken;
the beneficent woman will be remembered forever.
She is not afraid of evil tidings;
her heart is firm, she trusts in the Almighty.
Her heart is resolute, she is unafraid;
in the end she will see the fall of her foes.
She gives freely to the poor;
her beneficence lasts forever;
her horn is exalted in honor.
The wicked man shall see it and be vexed;
he shall gnash his teeth; his courage shall fail.
The desire of the wicked shall come to nothing.
Confession
I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic sprite,
But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
My world's both parts, and oh, both parts must die.
You which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new spheres, and of new lands can write,
Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drown my world with my weeping earnestly,
Or wash it if it must be drowned no more:
But oh it must be burnt; alas the fire
Of lust and envy have burnt it heretofore,
And made it fouler; let their flames retire,
And burn me O Lord, with a fiery zeal
Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal.
- John Donne
Wisdom from one of my teachers:
Some reflections
It's not surprising to me that Vicki turns the story of the Good Samaritan around to reveal a different meaning of compassion. In her classes on the prophets, we learned of the importance of the verb "turn" in ancient Hebrew thought. There's a restlessness, a constant recalibrating of assumptions, an endless adjustment to new challenges to which the prophetic faith calls us. The Spirit of God blows where it will, leaving us to turn from familiar patterns to uncertain adventure if we would be faithful.
I chose the selections for this evening's liturgy, as usual, in a somewhat random manner from various sources in which, on one level, my faith makes its home. On another level, I gravitated to an area where my critical mind hones in on as a place to explore. My faith makes its home in biblical and Protestant traditions; my intellectual curiosity awakens in the jumble of cross-currents of seventeenth-century culture. I note how both Monteverdi and Donne, contemporaries of each other, use the beauty of sound to deepen and transform expressions of faith. Where do we turn when we follow that beauty? Monteverdi's music pulls us into a psalm of right living, of responsibility, and a sense of virtue rewarded and wickedness punished. Donne dramatizes the confrontation of the sinful soul with the merciful God. What does one have to do with the other? How do we get from the biblical vision of salvation as progeny, to the Protestant vision of salvation as the individual's righteousness before God? And how do we turn, again, after a keen examination of our inner limitations before God back to God as the just interconnections among all living beings?
I paused at Donne's metaphor of God as an explorer of new worlds - at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Donne translates what will become the genocide of an entire people into a vivid metaphor for God's activity. In retrospect, we see the confession Donne offers as blinded by ethnocentric assumptions; it is the confession itself that requires confessing. Our hurt, our need, our loneliness - we always find ways to express our hope for salvation from these ills within the limits of where we stand, limits which may produce further ills we can't foresee. I paused again when I got to the end of the Psalm, and immediately thought of the demise of bin Laden, and felt something for the first time about that event. I allowed myself, for a moment, to settle into the sense of relief I felt deep down, and had denied myself. The Psalm felt right at that moment, but at the same time I knew it was too pat. I hadn't denied myself the sense of relief without reasons, one of which was a principle, held as a matter of faith, of not dividing the world into "good guys" and "bad guys," but of recognizing the impossibility of innocence. And I thought of how the event brought out the usual tensions in this community, with as usual, discussions breaking down into oppositions with some truth on either side.
As I sat in the tension between my two responses to that last bit of the Psalm, the two texts linked up in the whole ambiguous history of modernity, with Donne's poem marking the beginning of the European colonialism that unleashed various forms of violence and counter-violence, marked for us as Americans most dramatically in the events of 9/11. It's at this point that holding the texts together - Donne's introspection to the point of blindness of social evil with the Psalm's too easy assertion of reward and punishment in the social sphere - let me see something more broadly. I glimpse a story in which our prayers for personal healing are part of a relentless historical movement in which power will do what it will, in which violence begets further violence, that we can't separate our daily pain from the pain of the world. The biblical vision does not let us separate our thirst for God from our hunger for justice; escaping from the ambiguities - and the piefights! - of politics is a sure way to evade faithfulness to the God who spoke again and again out of vulnerability to empire. But, at the same time, refusal to look at where we stand, failure to point out the ambiguities within, rather than just the evils without, hardens our hope so we can't see where we fail to receive compassion, and turn our hearts to the neighbor in need.
A weekly prayer* is an opportunity to gather the inner strength of calm, reflection, and quiet. Tomorrow, or a day or two later, we will be back at sniping at each other, because after all, this is Daily Kos, and that's what we do best. As we do so, let us remember that the sniping comes from a genuine hope for a better world, mixed with a hardness that comes from a fear of looking too deep within. Our pointing outward at the evils that need fixing is a good from which we should not shrink. But the spirituality that calls us to turn, and turn, and turn again, should let us turn gracefully from examining ambiguities to naming evils, from pointing out each others' faults to examining our own weaknesses, from going deep into suffering to rising into hope.
Recessional: Simple Gifts