April 13/Wednesday of Holy Week
Insult has broken my heart, and I am weak, I looked for sympathy, but there was none;
for consolers, not one could I find.
I will praise the name of God in song, and I will glorify him with thanksgiving. ~ Ps 69.21, 31
Even though we may be through the worst of the COVID-19 days, life still feels a long way from normal. Our patterns of working, living, and loving seem altered, attenuated, strange. Anxiety fueled by inflation, war in Ukraine, continued economic disruption plague our lives, and a lingering sense of social isolation persists in many places. Grief and loss continue to lurk outside the door, ready to assert their presence and remind us who’s boss. We have endured a long, enforced loneliness; at times it has been a struggle to hold on to hope. Even the less isolated among us have experienced the bleak moment, the occasional dark day. Such despair is not limited, of course, to our current time and place; it is a universal human experience. As contemporary author and contemplative teacher Mirabai Starr wrote of her experience grieving her daughter, “When a feeling I did not think I could survive would threaten to engulf me, I practiced turning toward it with the arms of my soul outstretched, and then my heart would unclench a little and make space for the pain.” When we are able to acknowledge, embrace, and thus make space in our hearts to experience the pain, we are also making space for God to enter our hearts with his healing love. By doing this in today’s psalm, the psalmist is lifted up to a place of trusting confidence from which he can even, miraculously, offer praise and thanks. In the very act of lamentation, of naming our despair, we often find comfort. As we, too, bemoan our pitiable plight to our Lord, we sense that he is with us, comforting us, even at our darkest moments.
Compassionate God, Assuage my grief, ease my pain, and comfort me in my times of sadness. Amen.
For today’s readings, click here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/041322.cfm
To hear the Choir of Gloucester Cathedral chant Psalm 69, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPwcmsRzPlk
