I Love the Liturgy of the Hours

This doesn't really fit in with the next series I want to do here, but I just had to blog about it. Since Lent 2006, I have been pretty consistent about doing Morning Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours. It has been my experience that on many occasions I have been struck by verses from scripture in the Morning Prayer that speak clearly and directly to real situations I have going on that day. I wish I had time to blog about them all. This morning was a little different, but I felt it was so close to what I want the ultimate theme of this blog to be about - namely the presence of God - that I just had to write.

For those who don't know, Morning Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours begins each day with the Invitatory Psalm in a responsorial form. This is what it was today:

Let us exult in the Lord’s presence.

Come, let us rejoice in the Lord, let us acclaim God our salvation.
Let us come before him proclaiming our thanks, let us acclaim him with songs.

Let us exult in the Lord’s presence.

For the Lord is a great God, a king above all gods.
For he holds the depths of the earth in his hands, and the peaks of the mountains are his.
For the sea is his: he made it; and his hands formed the dry land.

Let us exult in the Lord’s presence.

Come, let us worship and bow down, bend the knee before the Lord who made us;
for he himself is our God and we are his flock, the sheep that follow his hand.

Let us exult in the Lord’s presence.

If only, today, you would listen to his voice: “Do not harden your hearts
as you did at Meribah, on the day of Massah in the desert, when your fathers tested me –
they put me to the test, although they had seen my works”.

Let us exult in the Lord’s presence.

“For forty years they wearied me, that generation.
I said: their hearts are wandering, they do not know my paths.
I swore in my anger: they will never enter my place of rest”

Let us exult in the Lord’s presence.

I had a vague recollection of the story of Meribah, but I decided to go look it up. Here's what I found:

Exodus 17:1-7 -

From the desert of Sin the whole Israelite community journeyed by stages, as the LORD directed, and encamped at Rephidim. Here there was no water for the people to drink. They quarreled, therefore, with Moses and said, "Give us water to drink." Moses replied, "Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the LORD to a test?" Here, then, in their thirst for water, the people grumbled against Moses, saying, "Why did you ever make us leave Egypt? Was it just to have us die here of thirst with our children and our livestock?" So Moses cried out to the LORD, "What shall I do with this people? A little more and they will stone me!" The LORD answered Moses, "Go over there in front of the people, along with some of the elders of Israel, holding in your hand, as you go, the staff with which you struck the river. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock in Horeb. Strike the rock, and the water will flow from it for the people to drink." This Moses did, in the presence of the elders of Israel. The place was called Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled there and tested the LORD, saying, "Is the LORD in our midst or not?"

There are two things I take away from this - First, having lost a child, I can hear and see myself grumbling against the Lord if I saw my kids thirsting for water. It's one thing for ME to thirst and try not to grumble, it's another to watch THEM thirst. Second - it seems to me that the question for those of the Judeo/Christian faith is ALWAYS - "Is the LORD in our midst or not?" Mind you, this isn't an intellectual question - we don't give our true answer to this question when we are sitting at a computer writing a blog.

God's presence doesn't satisfy our flesh, it stretches our spirit. Isaiah world-changing prophecy for "Emmanuel" - "God with us" - is another "go" at Meribah and Massah. Jesus REAL PRESENCE in the Eucharist leaves us with the same tension.

It seems to me that if someone isn't struggling with this question ("Is the LORD in our midst?") then there must be only two possibilities - they are either already well-conformed to Jesus Christ, or they haven't left Egypt yet.

The morning prayer for today continues with Psalm 80. I found this to be a "barn-burner" too. I quote just the relevant part:

“I freed his back from burdens;
his hands were freed from heavy loads.
In your tribulation you called on me and I freed you,
I heard you from the heart of the storm,
I tested you at the waters of Meribah.

Listen, my people, and I will put my case –
Israel, if you would only hear me!
You shall not have any strange god,
you shall not worship the gods of foreigners.
For I am the Lord, your God,
who led you out of the land of Egypt.
Open wide your mouth and I shall fill it.

But my people did not hear my voice:
Israel did not turn to me.
So I let them go on in the hardness of their hearts,
and follow their own counsels.

If my people had heard me,
if only they had walked in my ways –
I would swiftly have crushed their enemies,
stretched my hand over those who persecuted them.

The enemies of the Lord would be overcome with weakness,
Israel’s would be the good fortune, for ever:
I would feed them full of richest wheat
and give them honey from the rock,
to their heart’s content.

The highlighted line - "I tested you at the waters of Meribah" is the one that struck me. The problem with Meribah was that they had NO water. It was when the people grumbled against Moses that the LORD said - I WILL BE THERE. The water of Meribah was almost like the proof that HE was there.

God, give me the grace not to grumble when the water runs short.