Category: psalms
Every word he utters
It is good to give thanks to the Lord
to make music to your name, O Most High,
to proclaim your love in the morning
and your truth in the watches of the night. (Ps 94)
“His love is his loyalty to the covenant, and his truth is his absolute faithfulness. Every word he utters is to be trusted.” (John Brook)
Repeat after me: “Every word he utters is to be trusted.” Think about what he has said to you in the past, what word of Scripture has deeply moved your heart as you read it. “Every word he utters is to be trusted.”
We belong to Him
Bless the Lord, my soul!
Bless the Lord, my soul!
Lord God, how great you are,
clothed in majesty and glory,
wrapped in light as in a robe!You stretch out the heavens like a tent.
Above the rains you build your dwelling.
You make the clouds your chariot,
and walk on the wings of the wind;
you make the winds your messengers
and flashing fire your servants.Psalm 104
Storms
Storms. God’s own fireworks.
He made the darkness his covering,
the dark waters of the clouds, his tent.
A brightness shone out before him
with hailstones and flashes of fire.
The Lord thundered in the heavens;
the Most High let his voice be heard.
He shot his arrows, scattered the foe,
flashed his lightnings, and put them to flight.
Beautiful words from Psalm 18, one of the psalms from Morning Prayer this morning. But even more marvelous are the verses that follow:
From on high he reached down and seized me;
he drew me forth from the mighty waters.
He snatched me from my powerful foe,
from my enemies whose strength I could not match.
They assailed me in the day of my misfortune,
but the Lord was my support.
He brought me forth into freedom,
he saved me because he loved me.
In the midst of your storm, God is coming to you. He is coming to you to save you. Because He loves you. Be not afraid of the storm.
All times are in His hands
I don’t put my trust in the weather; I put my trust in God. All times are in His hands. We have had weeks of dryness, but even these speak to us of Him. This morning in Morning Prayer, we prayed these lines from Psalm 63: “My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water.” May that be true of us; may we pine for Him, long for Him, like a dry, weary land without water.
Yet I took heart as we prayed the Canticle from Daniel this morning: “Cold and chill, bless the Lord. Dew and rain, bless the Lord.” All times are in His hands.
“for you loved them . . .”
This morning I opened my Liturgy of the Hours to the Office of Readings for today (Tuesday, Week II, Ordinary Time). The first psalm to be prayed is Psalm 44. In the American Liturgy of the Hours, before each psalm there are two subheadings. The first is a summary of the psalm. The second is a Scripture verse or a saying of the Fathers that situates the psalm in the context of its New Testament fulfillment in Christ. “… the Fathers of the Church saw the whole psalter as a prophecy of Christ and the Church and explained it in this sense…” (Bl. John Paul II). I try to make it a habit of pausing before I pray each psalm to reflect on the two subheadings, especially so I can pray them remembering how they are fulfilled in Christ.
The first subheading for Psalm 44 is “The misfortune of God’s people”. An apt summary. The psalm describes national disaster and a search for God in the midst of it. “Awake, O Lord, why do you sleep? Why do you hide your face from us and forget our oppression and our misery?”
From that first subheading to the second, I have drawn an arrow in my book. The reason is to draw my attention to the wonderful news that we have in Christ. The second subheading is this from Romans 8.37: “We triumph over all these things through him who loved us.” What a wonderful word!
All my longing is known to Thee
Another little gem of a comment on Psalm 38:9 by Amy Carmichael:
Lord, all my longing is known to Thee, my sighing is not hidden from Thee.
“Only a simple word. This afternoon, words would not come when I tried to pray, and this troubled me; and then it was as if He, Who is never far away, said, What does it matter about words, when all your desire is before Me? Perhaps you, too, find that words will not come when you wish they would. So I pass on my comfort.
“In St. Augustine’s words: ‘To Him Who is everywhere, men come, not by travelling but by loving.’”
Look straight up and praise
I’m still delving deep into Amy Carmichael’s commentaries on the psalms. I can’t help but share the precious tidbits I keep finding. Here are her comments on that transition we find in the psalms from weeping to praise, that encouragement to look straight up and praise God with a song (when we least feel like it . . .):
“I have been noticing how in the Psalms every experience of distress turns to a straight look-up, and praise. I had not noticed till recently that the Psalm of the weaned child (Ps 131) ends like that: ‘O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and for evermore.’ And today I read Ps 69, and there again I found the look-up that ends in praise. Kay translates v. 10, ‘I wept soul-tears’, and that is just what it is like at times, when all we have done to help another soul seems to end in failure. Even so, ‘I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify Him with thanksgiving’ (v. 30).
“Surely this emphasis on praise in the Psalms is because to turn from discouraging things and look up with a song in one’s heart is the only sure way of continuance. We sink down into what David calls mire, slime, deep waters, if we do not quickly look up, and turning our back on the discouraging, set our faces again toward the sunrising.
“Perhaps that is what v. 32 of that Psalm means, ‘You who seek God, let your hearts revive.’
“I found all this very reviving. It led straight to ‘They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength’ [Is 40.31], and ‘Let them that love Him be as the sun when he rises in his might’[Jgs 5.31].” (Edges, p.159)
Remembering
From Benedict XVI’s reflection on Psalm 136:
[W]e can say: The liberation from Egypt, the time in the desert, the entrance into the Promised Land and then the other problems are very distant from us; they are not part of our history. But we must be attentive to the fundamental structure of this prayer [of this psalm]. The fundamental structure is that Israel remembers the Lord’s goodness. In its history, there are so many dark valleys, so many passages through difficulty and death, but Israel remembers that God is good, and they can overcome in the dark valley — in the valley of death — because they remember. Israel remembers the Lord’s goodness and His power; that His mercy endures forever.
And this is also important for us: remembering the Lord’s goodness. Remembering becomes the strength of hope. Remembering tells us: God is; God is good, and His mercy is eternal. And thus, remembering opens the road to the future — even in the darkness of a day, of a moment in time, it is the light and star that guides us. Let us, too, remember the good; let us remember God’s eternal, merciful love. Israel’s history is already part of our memory as well, of how God revealed Himself, of how He created for Himself a people to be His own. Then God became man, one of us: he lived with us, suffered with us, died for us. He remains with us in the Blessed Sacrament and in the Word. It is a history, a remembrance of God’s goodness that assures us of His goodness: His love is eternal.
You can read his entire meditation here.
Witnesses to Hope 