Psalm 65: Sacred Rest
Saturday, December 22, 2018
We are about to enter a week of Thanksgiving in the United States, a time when we traditionally set aside time for family and friends, a time when we traditionally acknowledge the goodness of the Creator and the generosity of Creation. It has also become a time for bargain shopping. Somehow we always manage to clutter up the time God gives us for refreshment and recuperation. It is as if we cannot stop ourselves from the neurotic filling up of time and space with meaningless objects and activity. A few brave souls have begun to push back against the opening of stores at midnight on Black Friday and I applaud their effort. http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111118/NEWS90/111119739/-1/NEWS I have even joined the petition. For some of us to bargain shop, others of us must leave family and home to wait on us. I think we as a people are missing something. Rest.
An excerpt I recently read from Richard Rohr’s Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate …Seeing God in All Things (CD, DVD, MP3) has set me to thinking. Today’s Noontime Psalm moves me further along in the same direction. Rest. We need to rest and reflect.
“The final experience of mysticism, after the optimistic explosion that we usually call hope, and the ensuing sense of safety, is of deep rest. It’s the verb I’m told that is most used by the mystics: ‘resting in God.’ All this striving and this need to perform, climb, and achieve becomes, on some very real level, unnecessary. It’s already here, now. I can stop all this overproduction and over-proving of myself. That’s Western and American culture. It’s not the Gospel at all.
“We’ve all imbibed the culture of unrest so deeply. We just cannot believe that we could be respected or admired or received or loved without some level of performance. We are all performers and overachievers, and we think ‘when we do that’ we will finally be lovable. Once you ride on the performance principle, you don’t even allow yourself to achieve it. Even when you ‘achieve’ a good day of ‘performing,’ it will never be enough, because it is inherently self-advancing and therefore self-defeating. You might call it ‘spiritual capitalism’.”
Rohr is telling us what we really know: we must step back from the high velocity life we have constructed for ourselves and we must give time over to God. We need to rest, reflect, and give thanks.
The psalmist intones: To you we owe our hymn of praise . . . to you our vows must be fulfilled . . . to you all flesh must come . . . There is no denying this truth. We owe all that we are and all that we have to God. For this we must give thanks. We all physically return to God. This is a truth that cannot be avoided.
You answer us with awesome deeds of justice . . . you are robed in power, you set up the mountains by your might, you still the roaring of the seas . . . the tumult of the peoples . . . There is no avoiding this reality. We might throw ourselves against our problems with childish anger but in the end it is child-like petition that brings us to our senses. This is a truth that cannot be ignored.
You visit the earth and water it, make it abundantly fertile . . . you adorn the year with your bounty, your paths drip with fruitful rain, the untilled meadows also drip; the hills are robed with joy . . . There is no tricking ourselves into believing that God has no interest in us whatever. God’s generosity is too enormous to reject; God’s kindness is impossible to refute. We may give ourselves credit for earning what we have gathered but it is God the Creator who makes the panoply of Creation available to us. This is a truth that cannot be argued away.
The pastures are clothed with flocks, the valleys blanketed with grain; they cheer and sing for joy . . . There is no evading these simple facts. God creates. God provides. God rests. If we hope to rest at all . . . we must first rest in God . . . We must call our friends and loved ones to join us in this sacred resting . . . and we must together give thanks to the Creator for Creation.
A re-post from November 19, 2011.
Image from: http://adjusttowellness.com/Kids_5Reasons.html
