Thursday, May 24, 2007

it's all about me

I went to my spiritual director this morning hoping for some words of comfort. I've been feeling stress lately, from a number of areas, mostly having to do with too much to do. On the drive over I ws thinking that I would ask if we could begin our session with some scripture. I was thinking in particular of Psalm 139 and its wonderful expression of God's pervasive knowledge and care.

When I arrived I found that my director, who works out of his home, was in the last stages of packing up his house so he and his partner could be gone for a few days while their floors were refinished and the walls painted. All the books were packed. After some hunting he did finally find one book with some scripture in it, a passage a day meditation manual. So we started our session by reading the selection for today. It was a scene from Acts where Paul is on trial in front of the Jewish court, the Sanhedrin. In a stressful situation, Paul notices that the court is made up of people from both of the two main religious paths, the Pharisees and the Saduccees who don't agree on their theology. Paul is able to deflect attention from himself by getting the judges to argue amongst themselves.

It wasn't at all the kind of message I was looking for. Instead of a word of God's steadfast love and care, the message was that we need to get ourselves out of our own bad situations. God gives us the tools we need: the wit, the skill, the imagination. And then it's up to us to use them to save ourselves.

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