February 17/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
Underlying the penances of Lent and the rules and regulations of our faith is the salient reality of God’s love. It is where we begin and end, and even as we drift away, or experience faith-shaking hardship – a death, a job loss, chronic illness, estrangement – that love is always on offer. Today, as we round out the first four days of this season of penance — 10% complete, for those who are counting! – the psalmist reminds us that God is truly walking the way with us, listening closely and with love to the needs and concerns we express in prayer. Our ancient singer invites us to petition God right alongside him, without apology. Petitionary prayer may be hard for us: we may be embarrassed to make mundane requests of a God who feels remote and transcendent, or afraid that our prayer will not be heard, or skeptical that our insignificant petition will be granted. Sometimes we entertain larger doubts: amid the complexities and difficulties of modern life, what good does prayer do anyway? Does God really listen? Is God even there? Our psalmist — whose life surely had its own complexities — is confident that God is both nearby and attentive. “Incline your ear,” he calls, and he imagines God bending his anthropomorphic ear, the better to hear the one praying. “Answer me,” he implores, and he imagines God speaking in an anthropomorphic voice. “Save your servant,” he invokes, and he envisions God stooping down to enter his day-to-day life and make things right. “Prayer of petition,” wrote the British Dominican priest Father Simon Tugwell, “is always an act of faith in this immediacy of God’s presence.” In the very act of making our petitions, we acknowledge that God knows us, sees us, and wills nothing but our good.
Gracious God, May we who are poor and needy forthrightly offer our prayers to you, trusting that you will hear us. Amen. For today’s readings, click here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/021724.cfm
To hear the London Fox Taizé Choir sing “O Lord, Hear My Prayer,” by Jacques Berthier, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhO69b5ZIZ4
