The Sadness of the Hopeless

Thursday, April 13, 2006 -- Maundy Thursday

"Morning Reflections" is a brief thought about the scripture readings from the Daily Office of Morning and Evening Prayer according to the practice found in the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church.

Morning Prayer begins on p. 80 of the Book of Common Prayer.
Evening Prayer begins on p. 117

An online resource for praying the Daily Office is found at www.missionstclare.com
Another form of the office from Phyllis Tickle's "Divine Hours" is available on our partner web site www.ExploreFaith.org at this link -- http://explorefaith.org/prayer/fixed/index.html


Today's Readings for the Daily Office (p. 957)
Psalms 102 (morning) // 142, 143 (afternoon)
Lamentations 2:10-18
1 Corinthians 10:14-17; 11:27-32
Mark 14:12-25

Sometimes the sadness of hopelessness seems overwhelming. Psalm 102 is heart-rending. Something about my reading of it today was simply unnerving. My mind went back to a summer 28 years ago. I remember reading the psalms to a woman in a New York hospital. She was dying of cancer. She was emaciated and could barely speak. But she seemed to love the psalms. I can't remember when I learned that she had been a national officer in the headquarters of the United Methodist Church. She had been the New York State chair of Church Women United. She was an important woman. A servant of the Lord and a person of God. I was visiting her as a seminarian-chaplain in the hospital. I only knew her when she was dying.

To this day, nearly three decades later, I remember these words from Psalm 102 because they spoke of her condition. I read them to her, out loud, rather stupidly. I had learned that she liked for me to read the psalms to her. She communicated that to me, though it wasn't exactly through speech, which was too strained for her. So day after day as I visited, I read psalms to her. But on the day that comes back to me, I hadn't read ahead in the psalter. I had started with those beautiful and triumphant psalms in the 90's, and the joyful Jubilate Deo Psalm 100 that I had known from my childhood when we did Morning Prayer on Sundays.

Then I got to Psalm 102. I was already reading it out loud before I knew what it was saying. I was committed before I realized what was coming. "Because of the voice of my groaning I am but skin and bones." (She was.) "I have become like a vulture in the wilderness, like an owl among the ruins. I lie awake and groan; I am like a sparrow, lonely on a house-top." (Her speech was only groans. She was ruins. What do these words mean?) "For I have eaten ashes for bread and mingled my drink with weeping... My days pass away like a shadow, and I wither like the grass." (I watched her curl up before my eyes, dissolving like a shadow.)

The psalm continues as the voice of one who will not survive but who pleas for God to act decisively for the future. Even from the death bed, there is the cry of hope for those who come afterwards. I cringed as I read these words aloud to this helpless, dying woman of great faith.

In today's Daily Office, Psalm 102 sets the context of the exquisite grief of Lamentations. "My bile is poured out on the ground because of the destruction of my people, because infants and babes faint in the streets of the city... as their life is poured out on their mothers' bosom."

And for Jesus who on this night takes bread, and says. "Take; this is my body." And the cup. "This is my blood." There is no escape from the horror, and the violence, and the pain, and the certain death. All is constrained. There is no hope in this life, at least within our lifetime. Any reservoir of hope must rest beyond the horizon of this individual death. That horizon comes to us all. We will all be the lonely sparrow on a house-top. We will all meet that which is stronger than we are. We will all wither like the grass. "This is my body. This is my blood." There will be a last night, a last supper for each of us. As far as that goes, we are all hopeless.

As for the future... There is prayer.