Psalm 15

There are quite a few psalms that echo one another and this is one such psalm. When I first read it, a worship song called "Who Will Ascend" from my years in the Vineyard movement came almost immediately into my head. That particular song is based on Psalm 24, but as I looked at the cross reference notes, I discovered that Psalm 24 is, in part, an echo of Psalm 15:

O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill? Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right, and speak the truth from their heart; who do not slander with their tongue, and do no evil to their friends, nor take up a reproach against their neighbors; in whose eyes the wicked are despised, but who honor those who fear the Lord; who stand by their oath even to their hurt; who do not lend money at interest,  and do not take a bribe against the innocent. Those who do these things shall never be moved. - Psalm 15

The psalmist is most certainly referring to the Temple of the Lord on earth and is writing about the kind of behaviour which is expected of those who present themselves to the Lord in His Temple. Obviously, this can also be seen as a metaphor for heaven. God is, of course, omnipresent, but we are bound by our humanity to one place at a time during this life. Once we die, we exist outside of time as God does and if we have died in His friendship, then we will dwell on His "holy hill" -- that is to say, heaven -- for all eternity.

That said, looking at this list of things, it seems a bit daunting. To walk blamelessly is to live completely righteously. How on earth do we manage that one? I know I'm not nearly as righteous as I want or need to be. To do what is right is another thing the psalmist lists. Do you happen to do the right thing absolutely all the time? I know I don't. To speak the truth, not slander others, to despise wickedness (that is, sin), and to honour holiness are all part of the list and I can honestly say that I have done the exact opposite of those on numerous occasions.

So how do we get to a place where we can be blameless before the Lord when we die? The easy answer is that we must put our faith in Jesus and do everything He commands us to do in His word. The two biggest commands are to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and to love our neighbour as ourselves. Neither of those is easy, but both are required. We simply cannot neglect them.

But no one is perfect and while we ought to aim for being perfect as the Father is perfect, we will fall short of that mark. When we fail Him, we must confess our failings, repent from our sin, and make a firm amendment to sin no more. As Pope Francis said, the name of God is mercy and when we come to Him, He is faithful to forgive us because of His great mercy. No matter how many times we fall off the wagon, we must turn back to Him again and again and seek His mercy. He, like the father of the prodigal son, sees us when we are far off and comes running to meet us, arms thrown wide to embrace us, forgive us, and celebrate that we are home once more.

To reach God's holy hill is a journey and one where we must daily put our faith in Him anew, confess our faults, and receive His mercy. That daily confession of our faith in Him and making amends for when we stumble is how we learn to see His face more clearly and eventually, with perseverance to the end, receive the prize for which we are striving.

Until next time...

Pax Christi!

Catching Up and Psalm 14

It's been quite a few days since my last Psalm post. I had intended to do one post each day as a part of my promise to God to read through the Psalms, write meditations on them, and post them here on my blog. If you've been following along and reading, my apologies for not keeping up better. Last week was Holy Week and with all the activity on top of the regular day to day stuff, writing these meditations kinda got shunted down toward the bottom of my priority list in favour of being able to rest properly. So, I'm back at it again, trying to do one each day. Here's my thoughts on Psalm 14.

**********

Psalm 14

Fools say in their hearts, "There is no God." They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on human kind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God. They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no not one. (Psalm 14:1-3)

"There is no one who does good." Wow. That's a kind of heavy statement. No one? All have gone astray? It paints a rather bleak picture of humanity. And as bleak as it is, I have to admit that the psalmist has it right. All of us are kinda messed up. I know I am.

I don't mean messed up in the sense of having issues or problems, but rather as in being prone to sin rather than virtue. I will echo St. Paul here: "The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners -- of whom I am the foremost." (1 Timothy 1:15) In other words, I suck and I know it. It's part of the lovely human condition that we inherited from Adam and Eve: original sin. We are washed free of the stain of that original sin in our baptism, but our concupiscence -- that is to say our basest appetites which often run contrary to what reason tells us we ought to do -- remains. It is this temptation to ignore what we know is the right thing to do that leads us into sin. It's why all of us go astray in one way or another.

Obviously the psalmist is speaking about a specific group of people he sees who are foolish enough to deny God and turn away from Him or do evil against the righteous, but I think it's particularly interesting that St. Paul references this Psalm in Romans 3. He begins that chapter talking about the Jews' special status that is promised to them by God's fidelity despite the various infidelities committed by the Jewish people throughout history. Then he goes on to say that we are all under the bondage of sin (Romans 3:9) and then references this Psalm in verses 10-12 to emphasize the point.

As I said, it sounds like a pretty bleak kind of thing to say that no one is good or does good, but it's true that we are a messed up bunch of sinners. So why try to do the right thing? Why not give ourselves over to total debauchery and depravity if nothing we do is good?

Because despite our sinfulness and inability to totally resist the temptation to sin, we who are in Christ have the gift of grace and that grace is what saves us. It is what helps us overcome temptation and choose to do good. It helps us grow in holiness on this earth so that one day, when we stand before Christ, He will judge our deeds as righteousness and say to us, "Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Master."

That's the goal -- to get to heaven. Part of getting to heaven is to do everything that He commands of us (Matthew 28:20) and that means cooperating with God's grace to resist sin, to do good works, and to persevere in faith until the end.

Is it easy? No, definitely not. Is it worth it? Without a doubt.

Until next time...

Pax Christi!

Psalm 13

Upon reading today's psalm there was only one thing that came to my mind. I could have very easily written this psalm word for word for word. The first four verses of it are basically every prayer I have cried out to God with in the last three years summed up pretty neatly.

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God! Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, and my enemy will say, "I have prevailed"; my foes will rejoice because I am shaken. (verses 1-4)

To me, this psalm just screams as though it's written by someone who is deeply depressed and has been for a very long time. I know that's why it resonates so powerfully with me. I think I've read this particular psalm a couple of times during the last three years, but it always bugged me because verse four wasn't the end of things. Here's verses 5 and 6:

But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.

I've struggled mightily with all of the things in the first four verses and the last two verses seemed like a foreign language to me. I had gotten to such a deep dark place and had been there for so long that it's fair to say that I lost my ability to trust in God's love for me -- much less any ability to rejoice in His salvation or sing because of His generosity toward me. In fact, as for singing, I've had difficulty singing His praises until very recently. I'll be honest, those two verses still ring a bit hollow to me. I'm a work in progress -- as we all are -- and the journey of recovery and healing that I'm on is a long one. I'm seeing little victories, but there are still a lot more difficult days and mood shifts that go down than ones that go up. Perhaps one day I will be able to connect with the truth in these two verses that I know is there.

Until next time...

Pax Christi!

Psalm 12

I'm a day late with this meditation. Yesterday was a long day and by the time I got around to finally having time to sit down and actually write, my ability to think coherently was long gone. I'll admit that there was also the issue of being frustrated and not wanting to write yesterday. With each day that passes, I'm finding it harder and harder to write. It's not that the subject matter is so complicated, but I think I'm hitting a wall mentally. That and the last several days, I feel like I'm writing the same words over and over. The more I think about it though, maybe that's what I'm supposed to do.

Today's psalm is subtitled, "Plea for Help in Evil Times." You know, this was written a few millennia ago, but given the way our world seems to be at the moment, it could have just as easily been written today. It speaks to how there are so few people left who are godly in the psalmist's world. It's very easy to see how that applies to our world. You know that old saying, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer"? For me, that is a good example of this idea. The reason the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is because of the sinfulness that so permeates our world. You can see it play out in other areas as well -- war, domestic violence, slavery, famine, the lust for power, murder, etc. With all that ungodliness going on, it's easy to see why the psalmist penned these words:

Help, O Lord, for there is no longer anyone who is godly; the faithful have disappeared from humankind. They utter lies to each other; with flattering lips and a double heart, they speak. (verses 1-2)

But those who suffer in the wake of such ungodliness -- the poor, enslaved, beaten, sick, unjustly imprisoned, etc -- are not forgotten by God. Even as the psalmist bemoans the wickedness he sees around him, he expresses his hope in God's love for those who follow him and suffer injustice:

"Because the poor are despoiled, because the needy groan, I will now rise up," says the Lord. "I will place them in the safety for which they long." (verse 5)

God does see when His children suffer and even when it seems there is no one left who follows Him, He won't leave us abandoned. He will place us in safety.

That's a hard thing to see sometimes in the thick of it. I know if someone had said to me during my trauma almost three years ago that God had not abandoned me and would place me in safety, I'd have thought they had lost their mind. Quite honestly, I would have thought that if they'd said it to me in the immediate months after the trauma. I had horrible flashbacks, the most vivid and scary nightmares I've ever had, and was mostly miserable and felt very unsafe for a long time.

Looking back on it though, I can see that while I didn't feel safe, God was holding me in a place of safety. He was loving me through others -- my husband Gray, my three sweet little girls, my big brother Chez, my friend Rikert, and many others -- and through the therapeutic skills of my therapist Pendragon. He kept me safe from myself on a number of occasions when I despaired of anyone who cared or loved me. Eventually, He also loved me through providing spiritual healing through the ministry of the Church and my spiritual director, Fr. B.

I still have moments and even whole days or weeks when I feel unsafe and abandoned, but I am beginning to know in a more powerful way that even when I feel that way, He hasn't left me drowning in the aftermath of the evil that wreaked such havoc on my life. I still have a long journey ahead of me, but I feel better able to weather the storms of this illness and this thing we call life (because goodness knows life has tons of storms even without mental illness!) than I have felt in a long time.

Until next time...

Pax Christi!

Psalm 11

As much as I love my Catholic Women's Devotional Bible, sometimes after I read the day's psalm in it, I have to go to another version to really understand the text better. Today was one of those days. Psalm 11 is just seven short verses, but it took me reading it from the NAB (which is the version that is used for the Sunday and daily Mass readings) to really understand what it was saying.

I have to say, now that I understand it, I'm definitely sensing a theme going on here: trust in God. Look at the opening verses:

In the Lord I take refuge; how can you say to me, "Flee like a bird to the mountains! See how the wicked string their bows, fit their arrows to the string, to shoot from the shadows at the upright of heart. If foundations are destroyed, what can the just one do?" (verses 1-2; NAB version)

When I first read this, it didn't make sense. The more I looked at it though, I began to realize that what it's saying is that the psalmist is in disbelief that someone would suggest that he flee. He trusts so firmly in God's protection and providence, that he finds it a bit absurd or perhaps even off-putting that someone would tell him to flee at the sight of the enemy's wickedness.

While I understand the psalmist's point of view, I understand the other side of it too. If faced with grave danger on the horizon, I'd really struggle to stand firm and trust God to take care of it all. Funnily enough though, I think many Americans feel that way about the upcoming presidential election -- no matter which side of the political spectrum they are on. There's a real sense that so many of the candidates are so awful that if one of the worst got elected that things would go downhill rapidly and intensely for the average American citizen. That's why so many people have expressed that they are looking into other countries to flee to in the event that their idea of evil happens to be elected. I remember hearing some of that kind of murmuring when President GW Bush ran for re-election and when President Obama was running the first time, but it wasn't nearly as many people as this time around and to be honest, it was mostly celebrities and political talking heads.

I'll admit, the thought of moving to another country in that event does sound a bit appealing, but not only is it completely impractical and impossible for our family, but I have to trust that God will protect me and my family no matter who gets elected. He has always provided for us and protected us before and I have no reason to believe he's going to stop now. I also know that even if the wicked prevail and rain down all kinds of evil upon the heads of those who follow God, they will eventually be held accountable for that -- even if not in this life -- and since that's not my decision to make and I can't control what they do, I leave it in God's hands.

I have to trust Him. It's a requirement for my faith, but also for my sanity. I don't have the mental or emotional wherewithal to be constantly worried about every horrible thing that may befall me because of this person or that person. I can't flee -- literally or figuratively -- from every report of the wicked's schemes. So I trust in Him and so does the psalmist, so I'll close with the final words of Psalm 11:

The Lord is just and loves just deeds; the upright will see His face. (verse 7; NAB version)

Until next time...

Pax Christi!

Psalm 10

Today's psalm reminds me so much of the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner. I'll be honest that I haven't read the book, but I remember some years ago that a friend recommended it to me when I was struggling with depression and wondering why I had to suffer when there were so many others around me who were doing all the wrong things who didn't suffer.

I don't believe for a minute that I'm a good person. I'm a sinner. I'm a big, fat, grievous sinner who hurts God's heart on a daily basis. I do my best to avoid sin, but sometimes it finds me even if I'm not looking for it. Anyhow, I am far from "good" but I am trying to be good. Actually, my aim is to be perfect as the Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). That said, I understand why my friend recommended this book. I imagine that the author probably quotes this psalm or perhaps another like it. Look at this passage:

Their ways prosper at all times; Your judgments are on high, out of their sight; as for their foes, they scoff at them. They think in their heart, "We shall not be moved; throughout all generations we shall not meet adversity." (verses 5-6)

The psalmist is talking here about the wicked. He's accusing God of being so far away that the wicked are not able to hear His judgments upon them and his proof is that the wicked are prospering in everything they do. He goes on to talk about how they persecute and prey upon the poor, curse their enemies and the like and that they have confidence that nothing ill will befall them.

How many times have you met people like this?

To be honest, there is a particular presidential candidate at the moment who seems to fit this bill. Despite all his ravings, outrageous comments, and behaviour that would earn most people a ticket to the hospital in a straight jacket -- he seems to continue to gain momentum and support like wildfire.  I confess that I am dumbfounded at times as to how on earth any sane person could possibly think he is a viable candidate for the office of President of the United States. While I'm not alone in my bewilderment over this, the sheer amount of support he seems to be garnering is frightening and makes me very scared for what could happen if he eventually wins in November. There have been times when I've wondered where God is in all of this. A couple of years ago, I would have likely thought God totally absent and deaf due to my own anger at Him, but thankfully, I've moved past that. These days I am able to say, "Lord, I can't see Your plan, but I trust in You."

The psalmist -- after he's vented his spleen about how awful things are and how the wicked prosper and while those who follow God suffer -- seems to come to the same place where I'm at these days:

But You do see! Indeed You note trouble and grief, that You may take it into Your hands; the helpless commit themselves to You; You have been the helper of the orphan. (verse 14).........O Lord, You will hear the desire of the meek; You will strengthen their heart, You will incline Your ear to do justice for the orphan and the oppressed, so that those from earth may strike terror no more. (verses 17-18)

And that's what it really boils down to in the end. Even if we can't see His plan, He really does see. He really is fighting for those who trust in Him. He really does have a plan and He is working that plan despite our inability to see it. When bad things happen to good people, the most fruitful thing we can do is trust in Him.

It's hard, I know. I've been there, done that, got half a dozen or more t-shirts. It's not your first inclination either. It may not be your second or third or two hundred and thirty third and that's okay. It's okay to be angry and tell Him. It's okay to struggle and wonder where He is in the midst of your darkest hour when He appears to be silent and nowhere to be seen. It's okay to be angry that you're struggling and trying to have faith and it seems like no matter what you do, nothing is changing or getting better. All of these things are a-okay.

Here's the challenge though -- stay the course. When you're struggling and you want to give up on God, keep putting one foot in front of the other. That sounds like stupid and ridiculously simple advice, but the image is powerful. It's something my big brother Chez said to me nearly three years ago. We were having a conversation about how hard everything was and how mad I was at God and how I wanted to just give up altogether and leave this life. After much back and forth, I told him I knew suicide wasn't the answer but I just didn't know how to go on anymore. His advice to me was to just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

After that, every time I struggled, those words and the image they evoke would come into my mind. As with most advice, it's easier said than done, but holding onto that image of just staying the course helped me hold onto sanity and reality many times. I continue to keep doing this because it's only by persevering little by little, breathing in and out, moving forward into the next moment, and staying focused on using my energy to put the foot that is behind to the front that I will ever get where I want to go.

This is especially true of faith. So put your trust in Him and when you can't see His plan or how to move forward in faith, continue to do the routine things you already do -- go to Mass or church services, pray, read scripture, engage in fellowship with your faith community -- so that you stay on the path and stay moving toward Him. Your feelings may tell You that He is far away or that You have wandered far from Him but remember, feelings are not always a good barometer of what is reality and what is a lie. You may feel far away, but He is always there and if you're making a conscious effort to at least do something to persevere in faith, He will reward your efforts in His own perfect time.

You may think I'm full of hot air, but I've been there. I've been there for a long time. In some ways, I'm still struggling with my faith and I definitely still struggle with putting my trust firmly in Him. Be encouraged that if you are struggling violently, you are not alone. The wicked may seem to be winning and God may be nowhere you can see Him, but He is with you -- and so am I. I'm praying for you, whoever you may be. If you need a friend to pray with you or encourage you, email me. Just click the link on the sidebar.

Until next time...

Pax Christi!

Psalm 9

Today's psalm is the longest one I've read thus far in this little exercise, but I know it's not the longest to come yet (Psalm 119 may have to be spread over a few days!). Given its length, I decided to take a slightly different tactic for this meditation. As I always do, I read the psalm in my Bible and then left it for a little bit. More specifically, I went and took a shower. I don't know about y'all, but I do some of my best thinking in the shower. Well, wouldn't you know it, I didn't think much about it at all. Instead, my brain went a thousand other directions. As I was coming back to it, I decided that instead of focusing on the entire psalm, I was only going to focus on a single passage from it. In this case, it's a couple of verses.

The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. And those who know Your name put their trust in You, for You, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek You. (verses 9-10)

This particular passage kinda jumped out at me because of the word "oppressed." As I said in one of my previous posts, I've been seeing all the red flags that would normally indicate demonic oppression for well over a year. Gray has said several times in the last three years that he believes that the severity and lengthiness of this episode of depression is due to some kind of attack by the enemy. Any other time I would have agreed with him, but when you're struggling amidst such heavy darkness, it's hard to see light or anything -- much less actually discern spirits.

I think another reason that he probably arrived at that conclusion was because of the drastic change in my spiritual life. It's not that I suddenly stopped going to Mass or doing the base level required stuff, but I lost my ability to connect to it, to find joy in it, and most of all, began to struggle with even wanting to do the basics. I found Mass to be emotionally tortuous at times and an especially agonising challenge most of the rest of the time. For a good portion of the last three years, I participated as a cantor (someone who sings the Psalms and Gospel Acclamation for Mass) and soloist as well as being a regular chorister. I felt like I had an obligation and that people were counting on me, so I stayed and I was honestly miserable. It got to a point where I not only dreaded Sunday mornings, but found that I had no desire to go at all. At some point, I began to feel a kind of revulsion at the idea of attending Mass and even told my big brother Chez that I just didn't want anything to do with anything of faith anymore.

Still, I pushed forward. I went through the motions week after week, month after month. I began to despair that I would never find any peace with my faith or with my relationship to God ever again. At one point, I began to question whether everything I'd always believed was really true or was just something someone made up. That was the lowest point. In that dark valley, apathy set in and the only thing that made me get up and go to Mass on Sundays or pray blessings at meal times and bedtime prayers with my children was my love for my children and my desire to be a good example of them. I wanted them to see me as someone who was struggling, but still continuing to practice her faith, so that some day when life hits them with something that causes them to be angry at God or question their faith, they'll maybe recall my example.

I don't remember what pulled me out of that low point exactly, but I know whatever it was, grace was behind it. A little less than year ago, I began seeing Fr. B for spiritual direction. That was when my faith began to change. It wasn't overnight or even after a few months. It took a good six months before I noticed anything at all. It had been happening gradually, but one Sunday evening when we'd gone to Mass, I realised that I hadn't felt so annoyed and angry. At some point after that, I had several bad weeks in a row with my depression. Given how bad things had become, Fr. B and I stepped up our meetings to every week instead of every 2-3 weeks.

I knew when I walked into the first of those weekly meetings and saw Father's purple stole, holy oil, holy water, a small hand sized Benedictine crucifix, Father's Bible, and a very worn looking small leather book that things were about to get serious. It was about to go down spiritually. That day Father heard my confession, anointed me with the Oil of the Sick for healing, and prayed prayers of deliverance over me. To say that it was intense is an understatement. As he prayed, he blessed me several times with the holy water and touched the crucifix to my head. I started bawling at some point and just kept crying and crying and crying. After he was done, I blew my nose and wiped my eyes. I wasn't sure if I felt different, but I knew that I was actually looking forward to spending some time with Jesus once Father and I parted ways.

We walked over to the church and he gave me the Eucharist and then left me to pray. I spent the next hour and a half praying, crying, praying some more, crying a lot more, and then I did something I hadn't done of my own volition in a long time -- I sang. It was just a simple Latin chant that I know and that was all I sang, but I sang. Don't get me wrong, I didn't feel great paroxysms of joy, but I sang. It was kind of a big deal. When I left, I felt emotionally lighter.

It didn't last though. That's the thing about experiencing spiritual attack or oppression. It's rarely over and vanquished in one go. I think that's because demons are kinda persistent. It's not much consolation at the time, especially if you've been suffering as long as I have, but you have to ignore that it sucks and be more persistent than the demons. So I went back the next week and the next and the next and the next. Before I knew it, Christmas was approaching and both my schedule and Father's got very busy. Then we went out of town for the two weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year's to visit Gray's family.

After Christmas, I set up another meeting with Father, but we didn't resume at our weekly pace. It was back to every 2-ish weeks. Then February hit and my mood took a serious nosedive. We stepped up our meetings again and Father continued to pray both deliverance and other prayers over me, hear my confession, anoint me, and give me the Eucharist. I continued to spend an hour or so after meeting with him to pray and talk to Jesus. Somewhere toward the end of the month, something significant happened. I didn't see it at the time, but Father did. He had told me earlier in that meeting that he really believed that my depression had both psychological and spiritual causes. I halfheartedly agreed with him in the moment, but was still clinging to not wanting to see oppression where it was clearly present.

After that meeting, my mood improved and I found I had more energy emotionally and physically. I found that I was actually enjoying some things, laughing more often, being less grouchy with my children, and that I was looking forward to things in the future in a way I hadn't before. It took another week for me to make the connection between how I was feeling and the spiritual side of my depression.

It's been about three weeks since that happened and although I've had some bad days, my mood has been more or less at the same level. I'm not joyful or what I'd call happy, but this feels different. I told Gray today that I'm starting to feel more like myself. I've been wondering in the last couple of weeks if how I'm feeling means that I'm turning a corner with the depression. I've been very nervous about even thinking that because I've experienced such disappointment in the past when I thought things might be getting better, but today, I found a kind of peace about it. Whether or not this is a harbinger of good things to come, I don't know, but I'm accepting it for what it is for right now.

So why the long story? Because at some point in all this mess, I realized in a very palpable way that I was definitely being oppressed and that motivated me to put my trust ever more firmly in the Lord. In some ways, I think my insistence on not believing that it was oppression protected me in a way. I needed to find my way back to God, to have some healing take place in that relationship, to let go of a lot of the anger before I could be in a place where I could call my God my stronghold and actually believe that He wouldn't forsake me in my time of trouble.

The other thing that I realized as I read this verse is that despite my anger, despite how far from Him I ran, I was still looking back over my shoulder at Him and trusting Him on a certain level. My stronghold was in Him all the time, but I just didn't know it. That obedience and that desire to have my children see some better example about faith in me, that was my trusting in Him to not abandon me (even though I felt abandoned). The reality is that He didn't and He won't and that is what I must cling to when all seems lost.

Until tomorrow....

Pax Christi!