Resonance...

[klsiegel320]

It is continually amazing to me, how what resonates in the psalms of the day is different depending on what's been going on in my life. I don't know why this should be continually amazing to me, but it is.

The psalms do not change. There are 150 of them (unless you're Catholic, in which case there are 151). In the particular Monastic Breviary, they are grouped into two weeks, and within each week into four bunches per day: a long set for Matins and Vespers, and a shorter set for Diurnum and Compline. Each two-week period visits all the psalms once. Over and over, around and around, week in, week out, Week I, Week II...

But over time I change. The part of me that meets the words changes. The part of me that needs to hear the words changes.

A particular set of verses from the Diurnum psalms today resonates:

If the Lord had not been on our side,
let Israel now say;
If the Lord had not been on our side,
when enemies rose up against us;
then would they have swallowed us up alive,
in their fierce anger toward us;...
...Blessed be the Lord!
he has not given us over to be a prey for their teeth.
We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowler;
the snare is broken, and we have escaped.

Indeed. It used to be that the "enemies" I thought of when we came to some of these psalms were the "enemies" who hounded me at a job I used to have. In the past year or so, I've come to see that the "enemies" who would make me a prey for their teeth are internal, at least right now. The demons I fight are all right here inside with me.

They resonate with the reading from this morning, too. This morning for Ash Wednesday we got the story of Jonah, once he finally got himself to Nineveh.

He's a funny guy, Jonah. He doesn't even want to do this job God has given him, but finally he gets the Cosmic Clue-by-Four upside the head and figures out that he doesn't get a vote in whether he does it or not. God sends him to warn the people of Nineveh that bad stuff will happen if they don't straighten up - so they straighten up! Immediately! Hoping that if they do, God will change his mind about smiting them. Would that we were all so responsive!

So he did what God asked - and it works! Great news, right?

Wrong. Jonah is pissed - royally pissed off - because God doesn't beat up on Nineveh. He's mad because they were bad people, and he wants God to beat them up, and instead God sees that they're turning a new leaf, and says, "Okay, you guys are getting it now; I'm not going to beat on you, now that you're turning your lives around." He says to God that this is just why he didn't want to do this job in the first place - because God would turn around and be nice to "those people."

Jonah is angry - angry enough to die, he says. So he goes and sits in his tent in the desert and sulks, because God is merciful. God makes him a shade plant, to make his sulking a little less unpleasant, and Jonah is pleased. And then God kills the shade plant (one of those acts of God I'm a bit less than sanguine about) - and Jonah is angry again - angry enough to die. Doesn't take much to tick him off, apparently. He sounds like a teenager - they're angry enough to die over everything.

And God says - you're pissed about this plant, that only lived one day. You're upset that it's dead. You think it was mean to kill it, even though it's only a plant. So tell me, why should I not be concerned about the people of this great city, where there are so many little children - so little they don't even know their right hand from their left yet. Concerned enough to warn them, to sternly warn them that they must change or die.

Jonah is like a lot of people I know: he doesn't want to know about people changing, about people growing. He's too busy holding their old ways against them, and wanting them dead. He's angry that there's no punishment for all their many transgressions, instead of being joyful to see how responsive they are to God when God calls.

I think we're always a bit afraid, when we start to change, that people will be like Jonah. They'll point, they'll laugh; they'll be angry because we're not suffering enough for the things we did wrong.

And it isn't always other people. Those enemies are within, too - the voices that rage at us, that try to dissuade us from changing and growing because it's too dangerous. Better to stay broken than risk the pain of healing. They are angry, when we start to take their power from them, start to change - they are angry enough to die.

God says, let them be angry. Let them laugh. Let them die. Take the risk anyway. If I'm on your side, my mercy is stronger than their anger.