Jan 7 2019 Ps 103

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name.

I had a crummy time sleeping last night. My thoughts and heart were racing, I was planning for the unplannable, and entirely wrapped around the axel. I know my thoughts aren’t me. I knew I should be able to focus on that moment. I should have been able to separate me from my thoughts, or me from my heart.

In an oddly similar way, that’s what this line says to me. Bless the Lord, O my soul. The head is telling the soul to do something. It’s as if these two are separate. The intention and action are separate. This would have been a useful reminder last night.

But even if I could have found that, if I could have been at peace with the moment, I would have needed more comfort than just being present. And this morning’s psalm contains such comfort. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.

I needed that too, in addition to knowing that my thoughts aren’t the same as my soul, or that I could set an intention with my head and have my heart follow. Last night and today and this past month have been super crummy. My husband and I will today go to a commitment hearing for a child diagnosed with schizophrenia, which by the way is a cruel disease.

I am hesitant to share more of that story, as I don’t intend to invoke sympathy or talk out of turn. But if I had a child diagnosed with cancer, I’d share that. So I will not perpetuate the stigma of schizophrenia with silence.

I share because I’ve never had great affinity towards the psalms. Some seemed whiny and angry. I couldn’t relate. Perhaps that’s because I hadn’t been at the same place as the psalmist, so their words didn’t strike a chord. Or maybe I was the whiny one. The psalms weren’t speaking to me where I was, so therefore they were irrelevant. Not a lot of empathy in that, right?

So here I sit this morning, heading into one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do as a parent, and I think I understand the psalms a wee bit more. They speak to us from the depths and breadth of human experience. The need to express anger, betrayal, abandonment, contentment, joy - all of our human emotions. And they call out to God with what we seek from God, based on wherever we are. Smite my enemies, help the helpless and oppressed, dance.

Bless the Lord, O my soul. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy. Indeed.