I continue with Psalm 51, vv
12-13.
Cast me not away from your presence.
A friend once gave me a bumper sticker that said “Do you
feel far from God? Well, who moved?” Since I don’t have a car of my own, I
stuck it to the wall of my office. Not many benefitted from reading it, though,
because it was in Hungarian. But some students used to ask me about it, and
that ushered in nice teaching moment.
In the Psalm, David prays, Cast me not away from your presence, and I’ve been thinking about that. God is in
all things, and God’s love is within all of us, “in whom we live and move and
have our being.” If that is the case, then could it really be possible that God
would cast me out of his sight? If he were to do that, we would immediately
turn to dust.
Rather, I would like to suggest that we cast Him
from our presence. and by this I mean that we push him out of our
consciousness and fail to consider that He is always with us, watching us and
guiding us, and that when we move away He suffers just as Jesus suffered when
the apostles fled when he was arrested.
But there are some times in our lives when we wish He would
look somewhere else and not at us, especially when we are about to give into a
temptation.
This is an important notion. So important, in fact, that Saint
Benedict makes it the first step on the ladder of humility:
The
first step of humility, then, is that a man keeps the fear of God always
before his eyes (Psalm 36:2) and never forgets it. . . . . let him recall that
he is always seen by God in heaven, that his actions everywhere are in God’s
sight and are reported by angels at every hour. (Rule of St.Benedict,
chapter 7, verses 1o and 12)
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me,
a sinner.
(And I thank the Lord
for giving me this inspiration today, because I was pressed for time and only
had half an hour to come up with something. I really felt like I was taking
dictation rather than writing something on my own. But creativity is often like
that at times, and this was one of them.)
God bless you.
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