psalm 26

 while reading psalm 26 this morning: 

"Lord hear my voice when I call." 

Suddenly it was the other way around!
 
"Hear my voice when I call. Of you my heart has spoken: seek his face.
It is your face that I seek." 

but it was not I speaking this but you! and for some moments I was stunned . . . .

It occurs to me again how short my memory of your presence is: seconds? perhaps a minute?
If tomorrow or even later today. I cease to think of you you of course are still there and present but I have no recollection whatever!  

St John Chrysostom

 "Do not scorn him in his nakedness, nor honour him here in the church with silken garments while neglecting him outside where he is cold and naked. For he who said: This is my body, and made it so by his words, also said: You saw me hungry and did not feed me, and inasmuch as you did not do it for one of these, the least of my brothers, you did not do it for me.
 What we do here in the church requires a pure heart, not special garments; what we do outside requires great dedication."

Thomas Merton

"I cannot discover God in myself and myself in Him unless I have the courage to face myself as I am, with all my limitations, and others as they are, with all their limitations."

seeing myself as you see me. 
only possible when we know that you still love us despite all of those limitations.

but actually it isn't a question of  "despite" but "with".
so . . . .
only possible when we know that you still love us with all of those limitations. 

it's still wrong because . . .
you love us with all our limitations. 
Therein lies the fundamental problem: 
failing to accept our own limitations we will almost certainly fail to accept those of others.
knowing that you love us anyway is the only way we are pulled out of this cycle. 

Both office and mass were particularly meaningful today. 

I change the words a lot in both. A lot of the grumbling psalms are presently about and for the suffering people of Gaza and the West Bank. 

Today is the feast of St Teresa and there was a very lovely reading from her "way" in the office of readings. Familiar and loving. Always this idea of God as "Your majesty" which smacks of Spanish absolutism to be sure but somehow twisted rather nicely. 

The mass reading too. Abraham sends away Hagar the maid and her son who she tries to abandon but can't! God is there yes - in her actions.

dualism and the trinity

 Paul's insistence on bodily resurrection is hard to understand but today I realised that it is a way to counter dualism: the separation of body and spirit which has been such a problem for centuries and has been for me too. 

in you the rift is healed. 
not in a "world to come" but now. 
you see us whole even when we cannot. 
though you try to show us. 

the trinity 
yes three in one
but more one than three. 

(and these are not two separate issues)a