Waiting for fire
A few years ago I began a practice of reading through the Psalms every month. I’d read about this ancient practice in a book on worship, and decided the structure and rhythm of it was just what my flailing prayer life needed. Truth be told, I had no idea. Engaging with these ancient songs on a regular basis has changed my view of, well, just about everything.
Who is God?
Who am I?
How do I process emotions, particularly the uncomfortable ones?
How do I live in a fractured world?
What does God care about?
What should I care about?
Some days I hunger for this ancient wisdom, and rely on a word, phrase, or chapter to buoy me throughout a day or moment. Other days, I scan the chart, locate the assigned chapters for the day, and read merely as a discipline. No expectations. No glittering outcomes.
To change things up, I decided about a year ago to begin reading the Psalms in Eugene Peterson’s The Message. If you’ve never read this magisterial translation, I encourage you to do so, and particularly the Psalms. Peterson’s depth and breadth of language, his sense of the Hebrew poetry, and his ability to capture the text in memorable phrases and verses are pure gold.
A few weeks ago, as I was in “reading merely as a discipline” mode, Psalm 5:5 set me back on my heels. Not a day has gone by since that I haven’t quoted it, and often, throughout the day. It has become a theme of sorts:
Every morning
I lay out the pieces of my life
on your altar
and wait for the fire to descend.
To give a bit of context, the psalmist is praying for help with what sounds like some vicious enemies. And apparently, he has been at it for a while, as indicated in verses 1-2:
Listen, God! Please pay attention!
Can you make sense of these ramblings,
My groans and cries?
Kind-God, I need your help.
Every morning
you’ll hear me at it again.
As I read these verses, I remembered a year in my life when all I could imagine was myself down in the dirt on hands and knees with tear-filled eyes, trying to pick up the shattered pieces of my broken heart, indeed, of my life. My hands were bloodied and raw from picking up the jagged bits and pieces. It was a rough leg of my journey.
If I’m honest, though, sometimes – many times! – I still feel like the person with the broken pieces, trying to put things together to make some semblance of a whole. The psalmist’s words and Peterson’s lovely translation both give voice to what many of us feel. We look at our lives: our dreams, our hopes, our suffering, our disappointments, our pain, our brokenness, and wonder how it could ever fit together to make a whole. Like trying to join segments from different puzzles, the pieces just won’t quite fit together, and end up looking awkward, quirky, unappealing.
And so we hide: the rough edges, the gaps, the insecurities, the difficult parts of our stories.
Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash
What if, instead of hiding all the broken and mismatched pieces we lived into them, even celebrated them? In his book, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship, Fr. Greg Boyle writes, “One of the signature marks of or God is the lifting of shame.” (p. 135) To see our stories, our broken, jagged pieces as symbols of and souvenirs from a journey towards wholeness seems to be the better view. Boyle goes on to write, “Find your story. . . Know your story. Remember your story. Tell your story. And always know, that at the end of your story, you are its hero.”
Every morning
I lay out the pieces of my life
on your altar
and wait for the fire to descend.
Each and every one of us carry broken pieces that we’ve patched together to make a life, the person – the gift – we bring to the world. And every day we can lay those pieces on the altar and know the fire will descend, that who we are is lovingly accepted and celebrated by God. Admittedly, at times this is difficult, even impossible, to believe. Our definition and vision of love so often overshadows the completely different kind of love God has for us. May we come to have enough of a glimpse of his love that we believe it to be true. As we watch the fire descend.