April 12/Tuesday of Holy Week
For you are my hope, O LORD; my trust, O God, from my youth.
On you I depend from birth; from my mother’s womb you are my strength. ~ Ps 71.5-6
The other day I heard the mother of a young boy apologize for her son’s behavior by explaining, “he finds transitions difficult.” Who among us doesn’t? Whether we are returning from a few days of vacation to a terrible mountain of emails and obligations, or making the more existential segue from teenager to adult, or middle-aged to “senior,” change is challenging. It is also constant! Every day, whether we feel it or not, we inhabit a different point along the timeline of our lives than we inhabited the day before. Mind you, this is not always a linear progression; throughout our lives we zig and we zag, we stop and start, we backtrack and plunge ahead. The continuous transitions of human existence can be unsettling and destabilizing; we may lose our balance at certain moments. But even as we make our way through time, bouncing all over the place, God remains a firm and utterly dependable presence. God has created us to be His own; he has offered us his strength and protection from before we were even born. In him is strength and peace. As the 20th-century British mystic Evelyn Underhill observed, “We are to bring forth the ‘fruits of the Spirit’ here and now, enmeshed as we are in the complex anxieties of our material and emotional life; ever holding tight to the deep tranquility of that Unchanging God who comes to us in the ‘sacrament of the present moment.’” We may teeter, but God never totters. Whatever dangers, toils, and snares we face, at any stage of our lives, we can depend on God as our strength and our hope.
Lord of life, As I grow and change through the years, let me acknowledge you continually as my unshakeable support. Amen.
For today’s readings, click here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/041222.cfm
To hear the Choir of St. Alban’s Cathedral (England) sing “Lord of All Hopefulness,” click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8mti7VL3gg
