Week Two of Advent: Monday thoughts on Psalm 27...

Sometimes the Psalms speak to me deeply and at other times I don't get a blessed thing out of them.  At first this Psalm didn't connect... but with a little time I discerned a shift so that its wisdom for this day began to arise. Scholars suggest that Psalm 27 was once two separate prayer poems - vss. 1-6 forming one unit with vss. 7-14 making up the other - and that makes sense to me. I think of the Taize setting for this Psalm...
Two thoughts are swimming around in my head about today's reading - nothing very deep or profound yet - just two simple notions:

+ First, although my circumstances are NOT like the Psalmist - who is clearly being hounded and persecuted - I, too love the serenity of our Sanctuary.  We have opened it every day during Advent to be a small refuge in the business of life.  Not many people take the time to stop in and rest, but each week a few do.  This is both a blessing and a quiet counter-cultural protest against the hustle and bustle of contemporary living.  In a book I bought while on retreat, World Enough and Time, Christian McEwan writes:

We live in a culture that is obsessed with speed, a culture wracked by strange illnesses and persistent low-level fatigue... That it might be possible to arrange one's life so as to be slightly less frantic has somehow become unimaginable... but what if you have come to believe, like the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, that 'the frenzy of the activist neutralizes his/her work for peace," or that " the rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence? (p. 12)

Man, does that speak to me on so many levels.  And so first I sit with the Psalmist - in the quiet and candle light of my Sanctuary - aware of the way so many of us are persecuted by the clock and the demons of our era.  As sister McEwan goes on to say:  "The Chinese ideogram 'busy' is made up of two characters, heart and killing, and that is accurate: the new emphasis on speed and efficiency is, quite literally, damaging our hearts with... hurry sickness." (p. 20)

+ Second, the Psalmist reminds me of the fears we ALL carry with us.  Sometimes we are not terrified by outward enemies - although they exist, too - but inner demons.  Or memories. Or shame.  No wonder there is a longing for a stronghold - a place of security and deep safety - where we might hide in God's loving protection for as long as is necessary - and longer, too!

John Michael Talbot used to sing of "the Hiding Place" back in the day...
I used to rest deeply in his music for, as Theodore Roethke once noted, "Art is the means we have on undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't."