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10:30 am Worship

Friday, July 26, 2024

Psalm 34: 12

Which of you desires life and covets many days to enjoy good?

A good question. Isn’t this precisely what each of us most wants? A human desire common to every person in every circumstance?

Kathleen Norris, a not-very-religious Presbyterian poet, stumbled almost accidentally into Roman Catholic monasticism. Her marriage was a wreck, and she had headed off to a Council on the Arts residency at a Catholic school, only to find herself housed at a Benedictine convent, surrounded by nuns. She almost laughed aloud as she recalled the moment:

“I said they’d have to tell me if I did anything wrong… I had the nagging fear that people as religious as these women would find me wanting and be judgmental.

“The sisters listened politely, and then one of them said, with a wit I’m just learning to fathom, ‘Would you like to read our Rule? Then you’ll know if you’ve done something wrong.’ Sure, I said, always a sucker for a good book. She found me a copy (of the Rule of Benedict), along with a book on Benedictine spirituality that the women were studying. As I went upstairs to begin reading, several of the sisters settled down to watch television, and I appreciated the irony.” (The Cloister Walk, [New York: Riverhead Books, 1996], 6.)

Long story short, this was how an irreligious poet stumbled into monasticism and the book of Psalms and there discovered every person’s question: Want a good life and a long time to enjoy it?

The poem where she found it (Psalm 34) answers its own question, not in any particularly theological manner. One need not be a theologian to read and understand the psalms. They are permanently welded to real life in a real world, even as they perform their poetic task. In the psalms, the hills skip, the heavens sing, rivers clap their hands, and every human struggles with emotional turmoil.

A small child could understand the psalmist’s answer.

Don’t say bad things. Don’t tell lies. Stay away from evil. Do good, seek peace, and pursue it.

This caught the poet’s eye. Want peace? If so, you must pursue it.

“In a marriage, in a small town, in a monastery, it is all too easy,” she later wrote, “to let things slide, to allow tensions to build until the only way they can be relieved is in an explosion that does more harm than good. Benedict’s voice remains calm – persevere, bear one another’s burdens, be patient with one another…”

Norris found peace and a whole marriage because of this strange confluence of events. The good life, with all that comes with it. The secret, it turned out, was in the little things.

Hymn of the day: Hallelujah. Online at Rossford UMC - Media.

Rev. Lawrence Keeler