March 26/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
As I prepare to attend my [big number here] high-school reunion next month, I find myself thinking a lot about the gift of abiding friendships. Even if I don’t always adequately express it, I treasure those friends who suffered with me through the awkward summer camp dances, listened in sympathy as I tearfully anatomized an unrequited high school crush, stayed in touch through college, marriage, kids, jobs, moves. The stability and trust that develop in relationships that have endured joys and sorrows, peaks and valleys, enthusiasms and distractions, are among the great goods of human life. Over the years, the durability of these bonds comes to scaffold our lives — support that we need more than ever in these times of dizzying flux and instability. And as we uphold our commitments, they will come to uphold us. As the German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to a young couple preparing to get married, “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.” Even more than in a committed human relationship do we find sustenance in God’s rock-solid and reliable presence in our lives, celebrated in today’s psalm. God has created us to be His own, loving us from before we are born. We don’t always respond with the measure of love he gives us — over against his faithfulness and unchangeability, we are ziggers and zaggers, stopping and starting, backtracking and lurching forward. While we are bouncing all over the place, however, God remains a firm and trustworthy presence, and we can rely on him, as 20th-century British mystic Evelyn Underhill put it, by “ever holding tight to the deep tranquility of that Unchanging God.” For in him is strength and peace.
Lord of life, Thank you for sustaining me with your unchanging and ever-present love, and may I lean on you as my unshakeable support, today and always. Amen.
For today’s readings, click here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/032624.cfm
To hear “Now Thank We All Our God” sung in Westminster Abbey, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c7VaTjyuLA
