Psalm Meditation 726
Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 18, 2014

Psalm 43
1 Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people;
from those who are deceitful and unjust deliver me!
2 For you are the God in whom I take refuge; why have you cast me off?
Why must I walk about mournfully because of the oppression of the enemy?
3 O send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling.
4 Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy; and I will praise you with the harp, O God, my God.
5 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.
(NRSV)

There are folks who go into a grief experience and never come out of it. They spend the rest of their lives rehearsing, rehashing and wallowing in the grief they have experienced. It is as if the continual grieving is the only way they feel they can adequately memorialize those for whom they grieve. They walk about mournfully as if grief were an obligation to perform rather than a process to work through.

There are other folks who experience grief as a process, a series of steps, leaps and lunges, both forward and backward, that leads to a deeper and renewed sense of life. These folks honor those for whom they grieve by living. They carry their memories with them, rather than being stuck in a remembered past. The psalmist is one of these folks. Grieved by oppression, there is a desire for the light and truth of God to lead a way through the mourning to a sense of joy.

My experience is that the presence of God makes the grief and mourning bearable. Knowing that God is with us gives us hope that leads to joy, praise and a sense of peace. The presence of God, and God present in the people of God, gives us help and hope that leads out of mourning into praise.

May 12, 2014