Salvum me fac in tua misericordia

Septuagesima Sunday 2014

The sorrows of death surrounded me,
the sorrows of hell encompassed me;
and in my affliction I called upon the Lord,
and He heard my voice from His holy temple.
Ps. I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength:
the Lord is my firmament, my refuge, and my deliverer.  (Introit of the Mass of Septuagesima Sunday, Psalm 17: 5–7, 2–3)

The Heart’s Cry

The language of the psalms is the heart’s cry of all humanity and of every man. The Psalter is the universal prayerbook: a prayerbook inspired by the Holy Ghost, entrusted to the children of Israel, presented to the Son of God in the flesh, sanctified in His Heart and on His lips, transmitted whole and entire to His Bride the Church, and quickened with her breath and her life–blood, day after day, in the sacred liturgy.

The Sorrows of Hell

In praying today’s Introit from Psalm 17, it is the voice of old father Adam and old mother Eve that echoes in the Church and, through her, reaches the ear of God: “The sorrows of death surrounded me, the sorrows of hell encompassed me” (Psalm 17:5). It is the voice of all the just of ages past who, like the holy prophet Job, endured the loss of things dear to them, suffered every manner of affliction, and found themselves surrounded on all side by — the psalmist says it — “the sorrows of death” and “the sorrows of hell”.  There are hundreds of thousands of people who are feeling this very thing today. There may be people very close to us and dear to our hearts, loved ones who are enduring the relentless assault of the sorrows of death, the sorrows of hell; sensitive souls scorched by what they experience as the brutality of everyday life.

Praying Out of the Eye of the Storm

The second part of the Introit is no less the prayer of those who are beset by suffering on all sides: “In my affliction I called upon the Lord, and He heard my voice from His holy temple” (Psalm 17:7). Prayer made out of the maelstrom of suffering, out of the eye of the storm, as it were, is rarely measured and neatly composed. It is a cry of terror. It has about it something savage, something primal, something that wrenches the heart. This is the very sort of prayer that God finds irresistible. This is the prayer that reaches Him even in the silence of His holy temple. And what, then, does the psalmist say?  “He heard my voice from His holy temple” (Psalm 17:7).

When Prayer Seems Impossible

Many people have said to me over the years, “I cannot pray, I don’t know how to prayer, prayer is impossible for me.” And I respond, “Can you cry out when you are injured? Can you weep when you are grieved? Can you call for help when you are in danger?” If one can do any of things, one can still pray. God is not remote and hard–hearted; He is not shut up in an inviolable sanctuary where none but His angels and saints can risk a whispered plea. God is very near, and His heart is divinely sensitive to our pain. The sanctuary, heavily veiled and closed off to all but a few select mortals of the tribe of the Aaron, has given way to the sanctuary of a Heart pierced through by a soldier’s lance, a Heart rent by a bloody gash that is eternally open and that will never close itself to sinners.

I Will Love Thee, O Lord

Knowing this, how can one not say with the psalmist in today’s Introit: Diligam te Domine, I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength: the Lord is my firmament, my refuge, and my deliverer. There are many souls, whose sufferings are known to me, to whom I want to say, “Take today’s Introit and make it your prayer; repeat it until it becomes familiar, until it lodges itself in your mind and in you heart. And then, let us talk again. You will have changed. This I can promise you.”

Happiness Is Not Where You Think It Is

The Collect says that we are justly afflicted for our sins. What does this mean? Is God an omnipotent and callous torturer who takes satisfaction in meting out punishments day after day? Sadly, there are people who have this distorted image of God; the very mention of God causes them to cringe, waiting for a rain of blows that, they think, must surely be destined for them. Affliction — suffering — came into the world not as a punishment, but as the necessary coordinate of a world gone off its axis as a result of man’s greed for power, self–determination, and riches. When God permits us to experience suffering, it is His way of saying, “Child, happiness is not where you think it is. For you, happiness does not lie here. You may think yourself capable of charting your own way to happiness but I, from where I am, see a better way. Trust me.” God will, as the Collect says, mercifully deliver us, but He will do so in His own way, in His own time, and for reasons that we, from where we stand, cannot begin to fathom.

Yet Will I Trust Him

God has not destined us for endless suffering. There is no suffering the end of which God does not have in view. There is no affliction for which He has not a surpassing consolation in store. There is no calamity for which he has no remedy prepared. There is no grief that He does not intend to drown in joy. The one thing God asks us to do is to cling to hope in Him and to say with the prophet Job, and with Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, “Even though he slay me yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).

The Rock That Is Christ

The Epistle (1 Corinthians 9:24–27; 10:1–5) tells us that all the while the chosen people were wandering in the desert — forty years of unrest, of hunger, thirst, illness, scorpions, and temptation — God was with them. Mysteriously, it was already Christ, the Bread of Life and the Giver of Living Water, who followed them as they moved from place to place. Saint Paul speaks of the rock that displaced itself, and from this I would conclude that the rock in its successive displacements is the sign of a God who never fails to give us the assurance of His presence, even in the shifting sands of an unfamiliar desert landscape.

The Gradual (Psalm 9:10–11) and the Tract (Psalm 129:1–4), like the Introit, give us the very substance of our prayer this week. I cannot dwell on these texts now, but I invite you to return to them, to repeat them, and to hold them in your heart later today, or tomorrow, or during the week.

God Does Not Think As Men Do

The Gospel today (Matthew 20:1–16) is intended to unsettle us. Jesus would have us understand that God does not think as men do, nor is He in any way bound to our limited and near–sighted ways of measuring out what we think right and just. To his prophet Isaias God said, “Not mine to think as you think, deal as you deal; by the full height of heaven above earth, my dealings are higher than your dealings, my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaias 59:8–9). How often are we tempted to cry out to God, “This is not right,” and again, “This is not just,” or even “God, Thou art wrong,” and “Thou art not just.” The wise man, that is to say the humble man, learns to say — and sometimes at great personal cost — “I do not understand what Thou art doing nor why Thou art doing it, but I will trust Thee. I will trust Thee even when trusting Thee feels to me like utter madness.”

My Trust Shall Never Leave Me

Yesterday was the feast of Saint Claude La Colombière, the priest who encouraged Saint Margaret Mary to trust her own experience of the Heart of Jesus.  Saint Claude’s life was marked by sufferings and contradictions of all sorts.  He found himself up against a wall. It was a question of trusting God or of altogether losing hope, and this is what he wrote:

My God, I believe most firmly
that Thou watchest over all who hope in Thee,
and that we can want for nothing
when we rely upon Thee in all things;
therefore I am resolved for the future to have no anxieties,
and to cast all my cares upon Thee.

People may deprive me of worldly goods and of honors;
sickness may take from me my strength
and the means of serving Thee;
I may even lose Thy grace by sin;
but my trust shall never leave me.
I will preserve it to the last moment of my life,
and the powers of hell shall seek in vain to wrestle it from me.

Let others seek happiness in their wealth, in their talents;
let them trust to the purity of their lives,
the severity of their mortifications,
to the number of their good works, the fervor of their prayers;
as for me, O my God, in my very confidence lies all my hope.

I know that my confidence cannot exceed Thy bounty,
and that I shall never receive less than I have hoped for from Thee.
Therefore I hope that Thou wilt sustain me against my evil inclinations;
that Thou wilt protect me against the most furious assaults of the evil one,
and that Thou wilt cause my weakness to triumph over my most powerful enemies.
I hope that Thou wilt never cease to love me,
and that I shall love Thee unceasingly.

The Light of His Face

The man who trusts God in this way will understand why the Church gives us today’s Communion Antiphon in such marked contrast with the Introit that opened the Mass: “Make Thy face to shine upon Thy servant, and save me in Thy mercy: let me not be confounded, O Lord, for I have called upon Thee” (Psalm 30:17–18). If, from our side, when all is darkness, we give the last word to trust, from God’s side, the last word will be one of mercy, and with it will come the light of His Face.