For Sunday, July 14, 2013 – Psalm 25:1-10
The little church that is my home within The Church of the Saviour has come through some difficult passages recently. We found we could no longer sustain our central mission, The Potter’s House, a place of hospitality and encounter, and yet we struggled to open our hearts to the idea of having to relinquish it. “To you, O Lord, we lift up our soul. O my God, in you we trust….” Have you noticed that it helps to go ahead and pray it even if you’re not yet able to do it? Finding real trust, the kind that would allow us to unclench our fists and release what has been a gift of hope and healing for over 53 years, without knowing what might come next, has felt like a long loneliness, an uphill climb.
St. Benedict says the mountain we climb is humility, the humility of having no clear answers, of seeming to fail, of “letting” our mission die. With the best of psalmists, we have blamed our enemies — gentrification, increased costs, the loss of a glorious past. We have even blamed one another for the inevitability of this loss. Pondering today’s psalm helps me know we are not alone. We might have been in over our heads, but we were in a vast sea of journeyers—at the deep end of holy — in the unfathomable depths of the human-divine journey. We petitioned God, we confessed our pain, we went to our sisters and brothers to seek a way forward. “Make us to know your ways, teach us your paths, lead us in your truth”—and we found that God has been listening all along with mercy and steadfast love.
The way forward is difficult. July is the final month of operations at the Potter’s House under our community’s stewardship—sorrow and love flow mingled down. AND the way forward is blessed. August begins a Sabbath period which will include renewal and renovations under the direction of our sister community, Eighth Day. When we were able, in humility, to lay it down, God sent other family members to pick it — and us — up. But we had to die to our precious illusions, and embrace God as quite a bit bigger than our fears, to get back to a beginning.
We are leaning on this assurance: “ALL the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness.” In the end, nothing else matters. Nothing else matters at all.
