Psalms of New Life – 11 September 2015

The Lord listened and had pity.  The Lord came to my help.

For me you have changed my mourning into dancing,

You removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.

So my soul sings psalms to you unceasingly.

O Lord my God, I will thank you for ever. [Ps 30]

What God does is create in love, always new life and freshness.  We start to become aware of this when we reach a place – perhaps even been driven by our experience in life to a place -- where we finally decide to listen and pay attention.  God intervenes, but it is always with some new creation… not some restoration of the old ruins or patterns.  A new life, it may be a new awareness, a new understanding, a new start, a new person.  It is crucial to understand this… the old stable orientation of faith we once knew becomes consigned to memory.  We don’t encounter with great relief some reinstatement of our old certainties.  We are now free, perhaps timidly, to venture outside the camp.  In Isaiah’s poetry:

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert… [Isaiah 43:19]

I will praise you, Lord, you have rescued me…

O Lord, I cried to you for help, and you, my God, have healed me.

O Lord, you have raised my soul from the dead, restored me to life…

At night there are tears, but joy comes with the dawn.

I had said to myself in my good fortune: “Nothing will ever disturb me.”

Then you hid your face and I was put to confusion…

For me you have changed my mourning into dancing,

You removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.   [Ps 30]

You who have seen my affliction…

Have not handed me over to the enemy, but set my feet at large. [Ps.31]

 

Set my feet at large…?  What a metaphor.  There may now be familiar things we can’t be bothered with any more.  God has brought us into a place of discovery, and this frightens some people.  It may be that prayer is renewed and rediscovered, and humbly explored.  Things that worried us, we are now setting in perspective and understanding a bit more.  But… this may not be everyone’s experience – I must avoid making patterns where God makes surprise and variety.  At any rate, it is likely that this new life happens, not suddenly and dramatically, so much as gently, inwardly, and at first even imperceptibly.  It is typical of the contemplative life that we become aware of change in retrospect:  “I wouldn’t have done that not so long ago … wouldn’t have thought that… would never have said that...”

I think this new life is marked also by a surprising reduction in anxiety.  This is part of what is meant by the Hebrew word shalom.  Jesus liked to ask people, Why are you afraid?  Love, as St John saw, casts out fear.  We find a freedom to make fresh arrangements with fate and destiny and the future, and the perennial fact that we never know what is going to happen to us or to others, as we say, what is around the corner -- to say nothing of the fact that we are mortal.   So it is, these Psalms invite us to choose life.