April 16/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.
But I am lowly and in pain; let your salvation, O God, protect me.
I will praise the name of God in song, and I will glorify him with thanksgiving. ~ Ps 69.21, 29, 31
Despite our efforts to maintain faith that “everything will work out,” sometimes it’s hard to hang on. We receive a devastating diagnosis. A dear friend dies unexpectedly. A longed-for job fails to come through. A troubled relationship falls irredeemably apart. Grief and loss linger, asserting their presence in our lives and reminding us who’s boss. But as we reel on the edge of hopelessness, a good cry can clear our souls, as the psalmist shows us in today’s verses. Weak, alone, “lowly and in pain,” he neither denies his suffering nor blames others. He simply voices his sorrow in the equivalent of a good cry. As contemporary author and contemplative teacher Mirabai Starr wrote of her experience grieving her daughter’s death, “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/041625.cfm
To hear “Ego Sum Pauper,” by Orlando di Lasso, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyXEK_GlVjc
