February 20/Saturday after Ash Wednesday
Incline your ear, O LORD, and answer me, for I am poor and needy.
Preserve my life, for I am devoted to you; save your servant who trusts in you. ~ Ps. 86.1-2
It isn’t easy to come right out and call ourselves poor and needy, is it? We have been trained by our culture to present ourselves as strong and capable, independent and autonomous. Yet in the face of a global pandemic, we are forced to reckon with our limitations. Friends with no underlying issues become severely ill; healthy young people experience debilitating side effects; wily new variants arise that threaten to elude existing vaccines. Schools close, jobs disappear, politics goes off the rails. Our sense of agency and our confidence that we can manage our lives — indeed, that our lives are even manageable — are under threat; no wonder we are anxious and uncertain. “It is very difficult,” observes Sister Ruth Burrows, an English Carmelite nun, “for us humans to accept our basic condition of poverty and yet it presses upon us from all sides. We cannot control our world; we are at the mercy of others and of what often seems a blind fate.” From the depths of such poverty and need comes our cry to God: “incline your ear, O Lord.” This humble, heart-worn cry is an acknowledgment that we need him, that we cannot make our way through the world on our own. The past year has had more than its share of loss and pain for all of us. Perhaps when the crisis is over and the virus downshifts to a milder or more manageable gear, when we can look back and make sense of it all, we will find an unexpected gift coming out of these months: a realization of our dependence on God.
Gracious God, May we who are poor and needy offer our prayers to you trusting not in our own righteousness but in your boundless mercy. Amen.
For today’s readings, click here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/022021.cfm
To hear the Choir of Guildford Cathedral sing Felix Mendelssohn’s “Hear My Prayer,” click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-Y7BihlpNQ
