Return to the Deep Sources

By: Rev.Talitha Arnold

Open my eyes, so that I may behold the wondrous things out of your law. I live as an alien in the land, do not hide your commandments from me. - Psalm 119:18-19 (NRSV)

 

“Return to the deep sources,” wrote poet May Sarton. “Nothing less will nourish the torn spirit, the bewildered heart, the angry mind” (“Santos: New Mexico” in Collected Poems: 1930-1973, from W. W. Norton).

 

Bewildered and torn, feeling like a stranger in their own land, the psalmist asked God to help them return to their deep sources. “Open my eyes,” they asked, “to behold your wondrous law. Reveal your commandments that gave life to our ancestors in the wilderness.”

 

Sometimes dismissed by Christian scholars as a praise song to the law or a pedantic teaching tool (each stanza begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet), Psalm 119 can be profoundly comforting and empowering in our time. Like the psalmist (and perhaps like you), I feel increasingly like a stranger in this land—a place where people are kidnapped by masked and armed men, where medical care for children and the elderly is inaccessible, where public lands are up for grabs. And when such inhumanity is authorized by people who wear gold crosses and celebrated by people who read gilded Bibles, I am lost in bewilderment and anger.

 

Like the psalmist, I need to open my eyes to God’s wondrous law and remember the words that gave life in the desert. As a Christian, I also need to remember the Word that became flesh and showed us how to love this world as God so loves.

 

Like Sarton, I need to return to the deep sources, for as the poet reminds us, “nothing less will teach the stiff hands a new way to serve, to carve into our lives the forms of tenderness.” Nothing less “will speak for love.”

 

Prayer

Deep Source of all Love, Strength, Wisdom, help us return to you. Amen.