The Words Are For Me!

Wise and helpful advice on reading the Scriptures came from a friend named Margaret, many years ago. It was not her original thought, but I have forgotten whose it was. She said, "When you read the Bible, always take the words as directed to you." That was a difficult lesson to learn, for, at times, I'd hear the words from the Scriptures or read them and think, "Wow! So-an-so really needs to take that to heart!" Thoughts of someone else's misdeeds came to mind more often than I care to remember.

As soon as Margaret spoke the words, I knew she was right. How absolutely liberating to read the words in this new way - as directed to me - to take the words into my heart and my mind to apply them to my life.

As for contemplating the sins of others, Mother Julian of Norwich says:

The soul that would preserve its peace, when another’s sin is brought to mind, must fly from it as from the pains of hell, looking to God for help against it. To consider the sins of other people will produce a thick film over the eyes of our soul, and prevent us for the time being from seeing the ‘fair beauty of the Lord’-- unless, that is, we look at them contrite along with the sinner, being sorry with and for him, and yearning over him for God. Without this it can only harm, disturb, and hinder the soul who considers them. I gathered all this from the revelation about compassion...This blessed friend is Jesus; it is his will and plan that we hang on to him, and hold tight always, in whatever circumstances; for whether we are filthy or clean is all the same to his love.

I am rereading Kathleen Norris' Cloister Walk. Norris is an Oblate of the Order of St. Benedict.

An Oblate is a lay or clerical, single or married, person formally associated to a particular monastery. The Oblate seeks to live a life in harmony with the spirit of Saint Benedict as revealed in the Rule of Saint Benedict and its contemporary expression.

She spends varying periods of time in monasteries with Benedictine monks and nuns. In the course of several weeks, the monks and nuns read through the entire book of Psalms, since they pray them at morning, noon, and evening prayer each day. Norris says:

But to the modern reader the psalms can seem impenetrable: how in the world can we read, let alone pray, these angry and often violent poems from an ancient warrior culture? At a glance they seem overwhelmingly patriarchal, ill-tempered, moralistic, vengeful, and often seem to reflect precisely what is wrong with our world. And that's the point, or part of it. As one reads the psalms every day, it becomes clear that the world they depict is not really so different from our own; the fourth-century monk Athanasius wrote that the psalms "become like a mirror to the person singing them," and this is as true now as when he wrote it. (p 93).

In praying the psalms we find ourselves - ourselves when we feel angry and vengeful, ourselves when we want to do violence, if only verbal violence, intermixed with periods when we find ourselves filled with joyful praise and thanksgiving from grateful hearts.

The psalms make us uncomfortable because they don't allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of it transformation into praise.

Norris' take on the psalms set me free, for I formerly found myself cringing at certain of the words, but when I began to pray them in this new way, I was able to enter into the poetry of the psalms and let it carry me along.

There you have it: another episode in the story of Mimi, who is neither a Scripture scholar nor a theologian, making up her Christianity as she goes along.