Let's begin with a reading from Psalm 25. To you I lift up my soul, O Lord my God. To you I trust, let me not be put to shame. Let not my enemies exult over me. No one who waits for you shall be put to shame. Those shall be put to shame who heedlessly break faith. Okay, this time the topic is Christian Witness in Crisis. a time for transparency and dialogue. A couple of years ago, I was helping out in a parish for weekend Masses, and there was a seminarian from the diocese. They got up and gave a short talk right before the Mass. And an elderly woman after the Mass was praising this young man for his being such a good and solid character, for whom they were proud.

[01:02]

And so it was a very positive statement that she was making. One of the points that the seminarian was saying was that the minor seminary at that point was filling up, that the numbers were greater than they'd ever been before. And so this elderly woman was really quite encouraged by this, but then she made a comment saying that it's so encouraging to see these solid young men joining the priesthood She noted how this forms a hopeful contrast with the previous generation in which at that point she was saying there is a good, it was almost like there's a good house cleaning that had been taking place. She concluded then that the church now is on the right track, is in a good place. So whatever truth there might be to her assessment, I think one glaring problem that was coming through, and this a couple of years ago is still in the height of the scandal of sexual abuse, so there's part of what was coming through was that she was saying is that

[02:13]

The problem that's associated with that is something that's over there. That belongs to certain individuals who had broken boundaries. Someone else, then, is responsible for this. And then the best approach, then, is that church authorities should come in, they should remove those that have caused this problem, and then we'll all be back on the right track again, and everything would be okay. The people of Jerusalem back in 598 was the first deportation to Babylon. And the proverb that the people were reciting was, the parents have eaten wild grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. The exiles, the ones that got taken to Babylon, were trying to make sense out of why this had happened to them. And if Yahweh was in charge, and he was punishing them Why was he doing this with such a severe kind of punishment? The exile seemed to be altogether too much.

[03:17]

And so this proverb, the parents have eaten wild grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge, is that the ones who are saying this were basically saying that this couldn't be a consequence of what I've done. it must have been something that built up over the generations, and it built up to be so bad that then this bigger punishment descended upon us. And you do read, when you go through the Ten Commandments back in Exodus 20, it says, dealing with how Roman Catholics would enumerate this as the First Commandment, you get a, have no other gods before me, but then it goes on talking about don't make an image of anything on earth or above or below, because that would be breaking this kind of commandment. But it goes on to say that if someone observes this commandment, up to the thousandth generation they'll be blessed for this. But if they transgress, Yahweh says, I will punish up to the third and the fourth generation, which seems to indicate then, according to this, is that

[04:27]

punishments get passed on from one generation to the next, they don't just sit there with one particular generation. But Ezekiel counters this traditional teaching that transgressions do get passed on, and he says in chapter 18 is that there really are no passing along of punishment from one generation to the next. So, we wonder what Ezekiel was up to when he was making this dispute or challenging the people in chapter 18 of his book, because when we look at families, we know that of course, shortcomings of parents they have an impact on the children. For example, if there's alcoholism or drug abuse or something like that, obviously that's going to affect the dynamics of the family, it's going to make its imprint on the next generation.

[05:38]

So we know that you do have the impact passing on from one generation to the next. What was Ezekiel trying to say by saying, no, God, when he looks at our lives, he punishes only what we do. The bottom line of Ezekiel's disputation was, is that if you think, you that have gone into exile, that you're innocent, and that where this came from was what your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents did, he says, he's telling them, go back and look at this once more. Because it actually, you're in this just as much as they. So, he was really pushing for a kind of greater sense of collective responsibility in this situation and trying to move them. I think his most important thing is that when something like this really happens and you feel like you've been done in, is you get the mentality of a victim.

[06:42]

And he's trying to say that these exiles really, he's trying to push them to see their situation as not being victims, which I think would have been a real tall order for him to try and push at that point. So, could it be that the recent crisis in the last decade in the church, which has really called into question in many ways the credibility of the church's witness, and that runs across the board wherever we seem to be in the church. It ends up being a situation in which I think many probably think of themselves as secondary victims of this boundary violation or abuse. And they see the problem as over there in other people. And even if there's truth in this assessment, there's a danger in which the solution often proposes, well, then we'll go in, we'll separate out the clean from the unclean, we'll purge them, and then after we've done this, we'll be on the right track again and everything will be fine.

[07:55]

But Ezekiel, rather, his approach, I think, in the crisis back in his time, was that his audience that was feeling victimized secondary victims in many cases. He was saying that what they needed to put all their energy into was taking responsibility for the current situation that they were in. In other words, there's a collective responsibility that they need to shoulder part of the burden. Ezekiel found this issue of the fairness of the exile to all those who were undergoing it. He found that, of course, a very perplexing kind of issue. As I've mentioned here, in chapter 18, he goes through and he tells them, take responsibility. Don't see yourselves as victims of previous generations' transgressions. But when he goes two chapters later, chapter 20, he says that the exile was actually foreordained

[08:59]

that it was going to happen before they even got into the Promised Land. So he goes through three generations in the wilderness, And the first generation that came out of Egypt were idolaters. And so Yahweh was angry with them, but he refrained, held back his anger and let them go forward and got into the wilderness. The next generation that was out there, they also transgressed, but he held back and didn't carry out the punishment. In fact, when you read the golden calf story, Yahweh was so angry that he was going to wipe them out, but Moses intercedes and says, no, no, hold back. It's not going to look good. The neighbors are going to think that you didn't have enough power. to sustain these people, so Yahweh refrains in the wilderness. So when Ezekiel looks at those early generations, he says that Yahweh held back his anger, and he let the Israelites go through the wilderness, and he brought them into the promised land, but it was already in the cards.

[10:10]

that they were going to get moved out of, that they were going to get exiled again from that land once they were in there. And so you look at this and you say on the one hand Ezekiel is saying each one of us are responsible for our own lives and that God is a just judge who pays us back for what we've done. And then you get chapter 20 and he says, well, we're all in this together and actually this was foredeemed at least three generations back and we're going to reap the consequences of this. And I think what it was doing was Ezekiel was This is one of those things in a human experience, how the bigger picture operates, this tragedy of the exile, he couldn't figure it out. And what he was really trying to do was to keep the people from getting caught in a situation where they thought of themselves as victims, in which they sort of lay down, blame somebody else, and then we just go with it at that point.

[11:21]

Which, in effect, what it does is it takes away all of my energy, my agency, and I say, well, don't blame me. I didn't do this. And what Ezekiel is trying to say, no, we're all, we have a collective responsibility in this. When this contradiction suggests, what this contradiction that Ezekiel was wrestling with suggests, is that many crises that we undergo collectively and individually do not submit to rational explanation. If we do try to keep it in the rational mode where we try to figure it out, we usually come up with a rather wooden explanation. And there may be a time and a place for these efforts at explaining, perhaps after some time has passed and there's sufficient distance to provide some kind of perspective to this.

[12:25]

But when the rawness of the crisis is still upon us or upon a people, then the response to this question of why is best answered, I think, is by taking it back to God and we ask God why. That's what we do in laments, is that we take puzzling, confusing situations that we seem to get caught in and we take it back and we leave it at God's feet and wait for God's reply to this. God invites us then to express our feelings about these situations, whether it's sadness, anger, a sense of betrayal, a sense of confusion. And these are situations in which we recognize that we cannot play the role of problem solver. To do so will only add another layer of distortion to the situation, for we are perceived to be part of the problem.

[13:26]

I think in our own community where there are a few cases and the media got really hot on this and they came, what was very clear is if a superior like Diabit would try and stand up and make an explanation and try to put some rationality into this, it was like you're digging your hole deeper. It was just impossible at that point. And the only thing you could do was to, and I think at the heart of it, was to turn this over to God and wait and move through this and see where God was taking us in this. So, this example of responding to this crisis in the church's credibility I think it brings home to us how much symbols pervade the life of faith within the Christian community. It's not only the symbols of the sacraments, but it is our very selves.

[14:29]

our embodied life that is visible to others, that forms probably the most powerful symbol. If we identify ourselves as followers of Christ and as his children, then our care for one another is the most powerful testimony that what we say we are is true. You know, we read the early church history and we see that expression pop up here and there where how much Christians love one another and it's that care, that concern, they were showing for one another that spoke volumes about who they were as disciples of Christ. So, I think the troubles that we've seen in the church in the last decade can be summed up in the question, are we who we say we are? And for many, the occurrence and the cover-up of sexual abuse was sufficient evidence to convince them that the church was not, that it was deceptive, and it was not who it said it was.

[15:37]

This I would label then as a crisis of symbols And that crisis of symbols that we see within the contemporary church, I think there's an analog back with the exile that's worth exploring, when the people of Judah were taken to Babylon and then how Ezekiel was dealing with this. Ezekiel claims that even though the Israelites were guilty of idolatry in Egypt and in the wilderness and merited to be wiped out way back then at that point, Yahweh held back his anger and he did not punish them for the sake of his name. Yahweh had pledged himself in covenant to the people while they were still in Egypt and he could not go back on his word. At the same time, the repeated transgressions of the people could not go unaddressed. And so, the time came in which he needed to go in and according to Ezekiel, to go in, purge the land of its idolatry and defilements and the desecrations that the people had heaped on it.

[16:45]

So, he decreed their removal from the land. But when he did that, the exile gave the appearance to all who looked on from the outside that Yahweh had gone back on his promise to have the Israelites as his people. So, the fate of the Israelites, whether it was up or whether it was down, it pointed back to the God that they were in covenant with. I pointed back to Yahweh. So, when the Israelites' fortunes fell, it looked as if Yahweh were unable to support them. And so, Yahweh pledged then, and we read this in Ezekiel, is that he pledged to restore them to the land. And according to Ezekiel, he was – the reason Yahweh brought the Israelites back into the land, it wasn't because he loved them. It's not, it is true that he did, but that's not how Ezekiel explained it. Ezekiel explains the reason that Yahweh brought them back from exile was because of his name.

[17:47]

Yahweh's reputation was on the line by having them outside of, and we look at this and we wonder, wasn't God bigger than this? But that's really where it gets to the point of what do we mean when we say who God is, how do we know who God is? And the way we know who God is in our tradition is the way that God is revealed in his people and in the events. And therefore, the only way you're going to know who Yahweh is among all of the major gods of the ancient Near East is how much power he exercises in the arena of history. And so it looked like Yahweh was not powerful, which of course then undermined a true perception of his reality. even though God's reality is too large, it's much too large to ever come to full disclosure within human events, within history, but they do manifest his reality and presence, and they portray who God is.

[18:58]

And so, where I would take this then is that we talk a lot about covenant relationship, we're in covenant with God, and if we recognize The God of Israel took a big risk in entering into covenant with his people because what it meant then is that these people are going to reveal who he is and whether God brings the abundance on them and then people look to them and say, oh, how good, how prosperous, how wise these people are, they really must be blessed. Who's behind them? And then it reflects to the general observer that God is powerful, God is good. But when God has to come in and punish, then the opposite takes place, and we start, then it looks like God is less than what he actually is. So, the risk of God being in covenant with his people. But in staying with the relationship, Yahweh took decisive steps then to purify Israel and his land so that the Israelites would properly reflect and therefore their lives would symbolize who he was.

[20:15]

And so, after he took them into exile and was about to return them, what he did is he put a new heart, he transplanted the heart, you read this in Ezekiel 36, he transplanted their hearts, and not only that, but then he put his, a portion of his spirit in them, so that they not only had a new way of thinking, feeling, but they also had God's life that was there interfused with them. And some critics will look at this and they'll say, what, what did God do then? It's almost as if he programmed them. And we read and we've been reading, catching bits of this as in the readings in the office, is that they repeatedly transgressed and therefore God put a new heart and new spirit in them so that they would be regenerated. But does that mean that they no longer had to choose to obey God? Was it like they had this divine heart, divine spirit that pushed them forward?

[21:21]

I think in some ways, obviously you can't settle the issue of are we free or determined in this? But what this action was clearly, I think from a positive perspective, was saying that God just upped the ante in terms of the grace that he was giving to the people at this point. So, he puts his spirit in them, brings them back into the land. On the way back in, to indicate that they still had choice, he does talk about a sorting in the wilderness in which those that wanted to return would be purged. and those that did not would be somehow left there or destroyed. But I think the key thing there is when they came back on the way from the exile back into the land and they're in the wilderness is that that purging is being carried out by Yahweh and God's running that show in that case.

[22:23]

So, what were the Israelites being purified from? From Ezekiel's perspective, the major sin was idolatry. And other powers then were receiving attention from the people of Judah and Jerusalem as if these other powers were really important to the welfare of the people. And so the people of Jerusalem, like whenever we talk about idolatry, basically what we're doing is we're hedging our bets. We're getting other ways that we can secure ourselves. Some ways we might talk about this as common sense, but I think the challenge here is where's the basic trust? And the Israelites had watered this down too much, and so they would offer a sacrifice to another god that was a specialist in this area that they were concerned about, and try and get his help or her help in this situation.

[23:27]

So, I think what we can get out of this is, when we look at those things that occupy each of us, individually we can think of things that I worry about, and if those are preoccupations, is there a way that these can get to the point to where they turn into almost supernatural realities in a sense that whatever is so valuable there that I'm concerned about is something that takes on a life of its own and it can become an idol in a way. At least whoever would solve that would be the idol. So, the remedy then, I think, is to take whatever we feel as kind of our vulnerability, whatever it is that we're really worrying about, and count upon the fact that Yahweh in his own time, his own place, is going to remedy this.

[24:31]

But the waiting is very difficult, particularly if we're anxious. This command then, which is at the very heart of Ezekiel's message, is that it's the command of exclusive fidelity to the Lord. And I think it challenges us as much as it challenged the ancient Israelites. It's very difficult to relinquish our important concerns to God and to let God carry us along. Instead, we often set to work to develop any number of strategies and we try and get the necessary tools in order to move what we're concerned about forward. These practical ways of working within the world are important. and they can be faithful service of God if we keep them within this context of waiting on Yahweh or waiting on the Lord. And so, we can take concrete steps if our underlying and basic trust is that Yahweh is the one that's really going to protect us in this.

[25:40]

One of the signposts that Ezekiel emphasized, which is an indication that the Israelites were going astray, was that they didn't observe the Sabbath. They're breaking it. And when we think of Sabbath, I was reading the other day and it was history of Christian theology, the fellow said, well, the Sabbath doesn't apply to us anymore. You know, we've moved beyond the Ten Commandments and I'm not quite sure I'd agree with what he's saying there. And if you've ever had the chance to be in Jerusalem and you go to Jerusalem on the Sabbath, everything shuts down. There's absolutely no movement in the city. You may get a taxi cab going to the old city or something like that, but it's, the quiet there is tangible. And to me, this is an extraordinary symbol of their collective identity as a people who are in covenant with Yahweh, that somehow in their practices, and you know, we read the Gospels and we're so

[26:45]

instructed by the miracle stories in which Jesus got into conflicts with Pharisees and scribes over healing on the Sabbath, so that we get the impression that maybe their emphasis on Sabbath was overdone. But if we take the flip side of that, move into contemporary America, in which I think over the last 50 years, we've seen the erosion of what happened. Sunday becomes, well, it's a workday, things are open, things really don't shut down that much on what would be our Sabbath day. And so, just by point of contrast, there's a real Once you experience that sense of silence and that collective observance of Sabbath, you get a sense that there's something, there's an identity that comes through in this.

[27:49]

And what are they doing with the Sabbath? It's their sanctifying time. So they say if they observe the Sabbath, then the rest of the time in the next six days in the week, will flow out from that and they get their life from this. So it's a practical way in which they have relinquished their hold on self-securing and they're honoring God as the sovereign and that somehow he's going to sustain them through all the ups and downs of their experience. Actions speak louder than words. Our embodied existence is one of the most potent symbols of our values. As Christians and Catholics, for whom the meaning of existence is communicated through symbols, we cannot afford to allow these symbols to become so tarnished that our lives lose credibility.

[28:51]

But the recent crisis in credibility in the church may actually be a call to authenticity. We need to be honest with ourselves of what we are doing when we eliminate sinners from our midst, when we send forth individuals that then basically serve as scapegoats. Are we seeking reconciliation with God? are we simply responding to our sense of having been defiled? And if it is this latter, we too must be ready to own up to and purge the idols from our own hearts and from our own routines so that our lives point steadfastly to Christ and the coming of his kingdom. So we might ask ourselves, what is it that I most trust in? As monks, we do not have bank accounts or property that we can call our own, but we do have things that we can perhaps accumulate that we take some confidence in.

[29:56]

Is it the service that I've given to the monastery over the past 40 years? Is it what I regard as a very faithful and shining example to which everyone should be indebted to me for doing this? Obviously, just the way we're put together, we measure ourselves and we're going to have certain standards by which we go, but do they become ends of themselves? And we should have a certain amount of pride in fulfilling those things. But do they in the end then become sort of a card I can play? Are they sources of power in which in the end I can say, this is why I'm upright. This is why I deserve to be treated in a certain way, with certain justice. And then when tough times come to a community, then do I say, well, I've done my part, don't look at me. I'm not responsible. And however difficult it may be to accept collective responsibility in times of crisis, it is important to wrestle with this question.

[31:08]

Ezekiel comes down, I think, as I indicated, he comes down on both sides of the issue. He gets caught in the real quandary of it. And so once you're caught there, is it individual responsibility? Is it a collective? And he's saying it's both. And you wonder, well, then where does that leave me? And you're really caught in the tension of that. And that's where I think he leads us into the lament, where you lay this down before God to lead me to a different place. where I'm at right now indicates that I can't find my way out of this, but God lead me to a new place in which I can understand. Which, if we're doing that, that very act of crying out in a lament is an act of faith, it's an act of trust. What do I trust in, I think is the question.

[32:13]

Do I have certain things that might be edging towards being idols in my life? Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be, world without end. Amen. Our help is in the name of the Lord. Okay, the title today is Relinquishment and Anticipation, the Paschal Mystery in Day-to-Day Life. So in our day-to-day lives, dying and rising is a dynamic that we experience over and over again. And in many ways, we're called upon to let go of something and then move on from this. So this capacity to relinquish is vital, but so also is the capacity to begin again in hope.

[33:15]

My homilists at our place over the past few years have emphasized this point. We get through 40 days of Lent, and then they say, well, actually the real work is beginning now. You've got 50 days of Easter in which you've got to embrace this new reality. So sometimes living into the Presence and the reality of God in hope is also something that requires quite a bit of attention. But relinquishments, of course, are difficult. We lose a parent or a loved one, we lose a job or a position, honor, reputation, or something meaningful, just examples of the way that we are called to die in this life and to recognize how fleeting it is. After the initial pain of these relinquishments have passed, then we can hear the words of the psalmist.

[34:16]

All of us, all of our life is like grass. We grow and we flourish like a wildflower. Then the wind blows on it and it is gone and no one sees it again. Psalm 103 verse 15. Such relinquishments are not dead ends. They're like the prairie fires, which we have out in our area in the spring. And what we do is we burn away the top grass that's growing up, and the grass then that's burnt turns into ash that goes down, and then it fertilizes the remaining roots that are there, which then brings on new growth. The psalmist expresses hope in the midst of relinquishment by saying, but for those who honor the Lord, his love lasts forever and his goodness endures for all generations for those who are true to his covenant and who will faithfully obey his commandments.

[35:20]

the love of the Lord that we repeatedly run into when we're praying the Psalms, the Hebrew word behind that is hesed. And it talks about the way God relates to us, but it also, and that's primarily what it is, but it also calls upon our way of relating back to God. So it's a kind of two-way street, this hesed. And it's translated very often as loving kindness, or perhaps it's loyalty. And what we know about this reality is that it's stronger than death. It does not come to an end. The Lord may withdraw for a while, an event that we probably experience as the Jesuit, I can't remember his name, Jesuit teaches at Weston, Richard Clifford, But he emphasizes in his commentary on the Psalms that when we hear about God's anger, rather than seeing this highly emotional kind of deity, what he really wants to emphasize is that

[36:26]

when the psalmist uses the word anger there, it's more often probably the absence of God or God's withdrawal. And once God withdraws from our presence, the pieces in our life don't fit together, so it almost seems like we're being torn apart in different ways, so there's tension there that wasn't before. So, the withdrawal of God, perhaps then an experience of God's anger. This point comes through very clearly in Psalm 30, which is a thanksgiving psalm, but the psalmist talks about how he's come out of the other side of what was a trying experience. And he says, I felt secure and said to myself, I will never be defeated. You were good to me, Lord. You protected me like a mountain fortress. But then you hid yourself from me, and I was put to confusion. And so this withdrawal of God, as the psalmist talks about here, really turns a person's life upside down.

[37:31]

And we do not know what to make then, I think this psalmist is telling, we don't really know what to make of what's happening, of what we're undergoing. When we have these experiences in which things seem to get really confused and tormented, we usually go to someone that we trust. We have spiritual directors, and we have conversations with this person and try to at least verbalize what it is that we're undergoing so that perhaps we can get some advice and opinion, and most of all just to connect, to have someone understand what it is that might be happening to us. And we also know one of the reasons we do this is we're, even to our best intentions, we're still subject to self-deception. And we may very well overlook what's most important. Through such an experience then of God's withdrawal, of feeling life in turmoil, we can see that there's much more at stake

[38:42]

within the troubles that we experience than a simple recognition of our sins and our weakness. Very often in these times of trouble and confusion, the Lord is trying to bring us to a greater awareness of our deeply rooted dependence upon him. Over time, we begin to see the profound meaning of the phrase, the love of the Lord endures forever. There's something wonderful about the litany that we recite in Psalm 136, in which the refrain that gets constantly recited, for the love of the Lord endures forever. The psalmist goes through the order of nature. And then he goes through the order of events in salvation history, and for the various items, he gets the audience, you know, the cantor, whoever recites the main point, and someone else comes back with this refrain, for the love of the Lord endures forever, somehow trying to make it seep into us and plant somehow deep in our psyche.

[39:52]

For example, he says, by his wisdom he made the heavens, for his love endures forever. He built the earth on the deep waters, for his love endures forever. He led the people of Israel out of Egypt, for his love endures forever. He led his people through the desert, for his love endures forever. That which transcends death is the hesed or this love of the Lord. It is the Lord looking towards us and caring for us that is the point that we cling to in the midst of a stormy sea. Chaos may be reaching up to our neck, but it is the love of the Lord that will endure forever. So this dying and rising experience forms the general pattern that suffuses the lament psalms. Outside of monasteries where we regularly recite the Psalter, lament psalms have really not been that prominent within a typical parish life.

[41:03]

You may get it thrown into a responsorial psalm or whatever, but they They tend to be something that has not been a form of nourishment for the typical Christian. And so there's, at least in some circles, there's been a strong move in the last 15 years or so to try and resurface these lament psalms. And what we know about lament psalms, every one of those, they give us an opportunity to give voice to what's troubling us. In fact, the language that comes through in those psalms is often so strong, forthright, and direct, and almost it's God asking us to be really honest. It almost seems at some points, you're almost, you're teetering like Job. You're really on the verge of being blasphemous. What, I think what's really important in that is the Psalter is trying to give us the language and probably more important, the permission to give voice to that kind of confusion, that we're supposed to bring that to God.

[42:09]

It's not like being raised, when you go to church, you're on your best behavior. And so, when you come in, only say what God, who's this very important person, you're going to lay – you're only going to speak politely before God. But Psalter gives us an alternative. It's saying, no, this God is not simply a royal figure, king of the universe, etc., but God is also your Father. And so, treat your dialogue, the way you talk with God, very much like you would do in a family, which is of course very respectful, but if something happens that you're really upset, the parent really wants the child to feel comfortable enough to come forward and say what it is that's troubling them. So the Psalter, the Lament Psalms in particular, tell us that we should bring every part of our life and lay it before God. All of these psalms, lament psalms, except for Psalm 88, brings us back up.

[43:15]

We don't just go down into the depths of death, but we also come right back up into psalms of thanksgiving, so we get that turning point in these psalms. But even in that dark Psalm, Psalm 88, which leaves us with, you've taken away all of my friends and companions, and my one companion is darkness, and we're sort of left there. Even there, the fact that that person prays, cries out to God is an act of faith. Why even bother crying out to God if you didn't think God was going to do something at some point? So, in the complaint of Psalm 6, we hear the psalmist airing his fear and pain. Lord, don't be angry and rebuke me. Don't punish me in your anger. I am worn out, O Lord. Have pity on me. Give me strength. I am completely exhausted, and my whole being is troubled.

[44:17]

How long, O Lord, will you wait to help me? and so many times these speak to our experience. But we see that there is an important handing over of these troubles to the Lord in these very words of complaint and petition. When this psalm resonates with my own experience, there is a deep recognition when it resonates. There's a recognition somehow, perhaps deep in my bones, that I can't live without God being there. So at the conclusion of the psalm, the psalmist gives voice to his confidence that the Lord will help him. And he says, the Lord hears my weeping, he listens to my cry for help, and will answer my prayer. As I said, it's this forthrightness, this honesty in prayer that the laments tried to bring forth to us. And in Psalm 6, in this movement from the initial invocation to the final expression of confidence, it includes some really strong words about the psalmist's enemies.

[45:29]

In the midst of his illness then, it seems like he's experienced ostracism or those that are around him are trying to push him away. These enemies seem to go after him and oftentimes we wonder what's going on there. And it may be that whatever is besetting the psalmist is causing anxiety in those around and they'd like to push him away at this point. But you see that Psalm 22, which Jesus prays at the time of crucifixion, that psalm has such strong imagery about the members of the community who turn into lions, bulls, dogs, and they, in the midst of this, perhaps it was an illness the speaker in Psalm 22 was originally undergoing an illness that probably caused a lot of anxiety in the community. And what ups the ante in the anxiety is not only the person is feeling separated from God,

[46:36]

and feeling torn apart himself, but the others around him are not coming to his assistance. And in fact, they're trying to see him as someone who's been abandoned by God and therefore should be ostracized in the process. So, you find that a number of times in the Psalter. The three main speakers in these psalms are God, the individual praying, and then the enemies sometimes get their words in there. So they're a key player in those lament psalms. In Psalm 6, he says, I can hardly see. My eyes are so swollen from weeping caused by my enemies. Keep away from me, you evil ones. And so, I think what the Psalter is telling us when he feels besieged like this, it's very helpful to take these kinds of feelings directly to God, verbalize them in the context of this prayer,

[47:41]

And I would argue that this verbalization, it's not simply a matter of ventilating or a matter of catharsis, you feel better after you've talked this out, placing it before God, but actually you've turned the whole conflict over to God, trusting that somehow God is going to change the situation. And the Lord's acceptance of these words and his way of going about it, it brings healing. The issue, of course, is always what's God's time in doing this? God's timeline often doesn't match up with the one that we would immediately like. So, these day-to-day experiences of relinquishment and of turning to the Lord to sustain us are ways of responding to Benedict's exhortation, keep death daily before your eyes. It's not enough that we have this idea in our heads that we are transitory.

[48:46]

We are summoned to take actions that indicate our belief that we are moving before the Lord, stripped of all of our contrived securities and of all of our accomplishments. When the prophet Ezekiel exhorted his exilic audience to take responsibility for their part in the exile, he taught that we humans, each as individuals, are held accountable for our own sins and do not inherit the punishment from our parents or grandparents. He then went on to make statements about the importance of our decision to be in right relationship with God. He teaches, if an evil one stops sinning and keeps my laws, and if he does what is right and good, he will not die, he will certainly live. And all his sins will be forgiven, and he will live because he did what is right.

[49:46]

But then he goes on to say, but if the righteous one stops doing good and starts doing all the evil, disgusting things that evil ones do, will he go on living? No. None of the good that he did will be remembered. He will die because of his unfaithfulness and his sins. Ezekiel's statement here in this final part that all the good things that one has done in life will not be remembered was an expression that when I initially read that and for some time after wondered what's going on here because it how could this be it really didn't fit with at least the model that I'd been raised on perhaps coming out of the Baltimore Catechism in which you look at your mortal and your venial sins, and it's only the mortal sins that are going to cut you off from God. But there was a sense that if I live a good life, then I should be able to

[50:51]

somehow gain happiness in the next life. But that sort of counting up of good deeds and bad deeds, Ezekiel really pulls the rug out from underneath that here because he's saying that I can do good all the way through my life and if for some very odd strange reason at the very end I renounce God, I'm done. Now, what I think we would expect is if indeed my life had been faithful, that there would be a real texture to my person at that point to where I probably would be able to stand in the trial, at least we would hope. But Ezekiel is telling his audience here, who's in the midst of a deep crisis, that it really depends right now on the decision that you make to remain faithful. And that's the big thing that's most important. For him, it's not a catalog of mortal and venial sins.

[51:57]

For him, the big sin is whether I'm going to honor Yahweh. It's that first commandment. You aren't to have any other gods before me. So it's that Old Testament, really if you have to summarize the Old Testament, which is always dangerous to try and summarize, but I think the real key element that drives that is this exclusive fidelity to Yahweh. And you get it in the Shema, which is Deuteronomy 6, 4, opening, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. And it's that focusing, sort of purity of heart, focusing, that ends up being what's key in all of this. And in some ways, I don't know enough about Luther to wonder, to know if he built on these early prophets. He certainly steeped in scripture, but his view of a human being is very much like what you find in the prophet Ezekiel, because Ezekiel is at the point where, as we talked about yesterday,

[53:07]

that God would put a new heart and then he would put his spirit in human beings because the Israelite people were just not able to remain faithful. They would go through and they would try and they would try and all of a sudden they'd fall down. So it's a kind of pessimistic view of human nature that's there. Ezekiel is saying the only way out of this thing is if God does this real dramatic intervention and he puts a new heart and a new spirit in us, which is very much the faith works argument that you find that came up at the time of the Reformation in which we're saved by faith. and not by works, which of course is embedded in Paul also, but it's clearly there in Ezekiel. So, keeping this exclusive trust and fidelity in God, which should be something sort of our anchor point, our focus, it

[54:14]

it calls us to let go of other things that we might take confidence in, things that are more tangible that we can count on. And I think, you know, the reading that you've been doing in the last evening, I think in the evening before that also, I think it was from, if I heard correctly, from Gregory Bong, and he was going through the whole question of, our economic system and the downside of globalization in which there's a sort of intensifies exploitation of the world. And so my point here is relinquishment, stepping back from things. Part of what I suspect is a real problem for all of us is, and particularly within the secularized Western world, is that we try to find

[55:17]

a certain amount of meaning or texture in life by the things that we have around us. And some of those are obviously God's gifts, they're very good. But the key question here is if we overtax them. Do I put too much weight on certain things that I have or on these good gifts and I make them, which are material things in their own proper way, but I make them satisfy spiritual longings and spiritual desires that I have, and they never can quite do that, so I get more of them, more of them. So, you wonder if our whole system in the West, which is built upon a lot of advertising, which the whole tactic there is to try and get people to desire things they never thought of before. So you start stirring up desire, and if you satisfy one after the other, so the system, how does it work? Sundays talked about Sabbath being eroded.

[56:22]

Well, people, what do we do on Sunday? A lot of people go to the shopping mall. Anyway, it's a big, big topic. But the question has to do with how do we how do we relinquish and step back from material things which we probably readily make satisfy what are our spiritual hungers which can only be satisfied by God being there. So, how do we die to those things? And dying to them opens the way to a new kind of life, a new resurrection that's there. Now these are sort of daily forms of dying, but we also know that there are forms of death that reach really crisis proportions, the difficult ones to navigate. They have a sense of finality about him. in which we really confront death as death, in which things are finished and over with.

[57:28]

The prophet Ezekiel in chapter 37 is probably one of the more well-known passages in his work. In fact, when I've talked to people about the book of Ezekiel, the first – there are even They have very little acquaintance with the book. Oh, they'll say, oh, those dry bones. So you get to chapter 37, in which you have Ezekiel out there. He's looking at this field, which of course is a, there seems to have been a battle that happened, and the side that lost. and the victors have withdrawn and the ones who've lost their corpses are laying there. And of course the birds of prey came and they picked the bones clean. So all you have are these dry bones out there. And here's where Ezekiel is brought before this and Yahweh says to him, speak to these bones. And, so he speaks to them the prophetic word, and we get this picture of the, and we hear the bones rattling, and then all of a sudden they start coming together, and it's like they're reconstituting, forming a human skeleton, and then the skin comes up over the outside of them.

[58:38]

So it's all, in some ways, if you imagine yourself as being a potter, making from clay and forming a human shape. It's almost like that. So, in a way, this chapter is a counterpart to Genesis 2 in which Yahweh was creating human beings in the garden. But here you get these dead bones coming back to life. And it happens, of course, in two stages, just like in Genesis 2. Once these the bones and the skin are back up over them, they're like lifeless statues that are there. And there's, okay, you've got them reconstituted, but there's no life there. And the prophet, Yahweh tells the prophet, then speak to them again from the spirit that comes from the four directions. And so that the wind, the word for spirit there is ruach, which means wind and it means breath. And it comes from all four directions at once. miraculous, of course, otherwise impossible.

[59:42]

This four, this cosmic spirit from all directions comes and goes into those clay-like statues that have been reconstituted from the bones and they come back to life again. The usual interpretation of this is that this is a a vision that the prophet has while he's in exile, which tells him that our people, the Israelites, are now going to be restored as a nation. And so, they usually interpret this thing as a collective kind of restoration, and they refrain, most step back and they say, we really don't have clear indication that this is talking about the resurrection of the individual, which usually And they say the first one indication that we have of this would be in Daniel. Daniel chapter 12 starts talking about resurrection of the individual, which would have been Ezekiel is in 500, early 500s.

[60:47]

Daniel is in around 164 or so. So, it would have been much later that they've talked about resurrection of the individual, but I'm not so sure. You know, you look at this and you see here's one set of bones coming back up and that life is coming into it. So it seems to me that they're resurrected individuals within the context of a community, which for Ezekiel, he's talked so much about individual responsibility. This would seem to fit together with that. And the other piece that I would pick up from this is, you know, when you read through the Old Testament, it doesn't talk about life after death. And we usually refer that until you get to the later parts of it, as I said with Daniel. And then, so there is a forerunner, there is an expectation of life after death by the time you get to Jesus. But you wonder about all these people back in those early centuries, what did they think about when you die?

[61:51]

And you could say, well, your meaning in life is between birth and death, and everything, like you get to end of Psalm 90, in which the person has experienced a lot of God's anger, and he says at the end of it, but please balance out, make the good things in life balance out with the shortcomings, so it all makes sense in that context. But I think You know, you look around Egypt, the kings there, they were... nullified, they were honored. There's a conception of life after death. The time of Ezekiel, Zoroastrians were talking about a kind of life after a resurrection of the individual. And you know, you go into the Old Testament and you wonder the people out on the hillsides and their families, what were their set of beliefs over against what the beliefs were in Jerusalem.

[62:55]

And Jerusalem is the one that ends up giving us the Old Testament in its final form, and they edited it. And I think what, in domestic life, that it was very typical that you would, from various early primitive times, they would bury their ancestors under the floor. Then you would bury, in Israelite times, you were burying your ancestors on your family farm or on your plot of land, which is why Naboth, you read 1 Kings 21, he would not sell his plot of land to King Ahab, and Ahab tried to get it away from him. But the reason he would not, probably the reason they would not sell the land, is it was sacred. and their parents, their grandparents, had been buried there, and that their presence was somehow still there. In Mesopotamia, there's a chapter in the Gilgamesh ethic that talks about when Enkidu, Gilgamesh's friend, he goes down into the underworld, and he reports back what it's like down there.

[64:05]

And he says the guy that had two sons gets this much water and bread. guy that had three sons has this much, and the guy that had seven. So, he goes all the way through, which was making the argument that the offerings that are made and honoring the dead, that that somehow was giving them, in some way, it revivified them, it gave them a higher level of life. And if we look for analogies within our Christian tradition, we think of intercessory prayers for the dead, we think of perhaps anniversary masses, etc. What are these doing for those who have passed on? Isn't their life in God's hands at this point? But I think there's a long-standing tradition of that, that somehow what we do in honoring the memory of the dead brings them a form of new life.

[65:08]

So, in light of this, I think there probably was some very deeply ingrained sense in the Israelite people that lived in their families on the hillsides. There's a deeply ingrained feeling that there is a life after death, and that it does, even though it's probably shadowy, it's like being entombed alive in a sense that you're in a place without much light, and it's gloomy, it was their picture of this, that it could be improved by offerings. So, there was a real obligation on the part of family members to honor those who had passed before them. this land then of the Israelites that I mentioned as being sacred because it honors the people that are there.

[66:11]

I think we might pick that up in terms of Family farms, I know, in our part of the country, they're becoming so infrequent because corporations have bought all these things up. And there's a real crisis in people when they have to let that go. My own family, we lived in town, so we had this little three-bedroom house. Six children raised in this, and at the time my parents were selling this, my mother was saying, You know, all the memories that are going to go with this, that are going to be gone by the wayside once we let go of this. But they did move. And I think it tells us, though, something about places. that the material dimension of our lives, where we're there, that they take on a sort of sacred quality by the interactions that we have with one another and the memories that are there.

[67:12]

So, this Letting go, though, is something that happens in all of our lives, even no matter how sacred a place is, you've got to step back from it. Another experience of letting go and of sort of mourning that you've lost something occurs in monastic funerals. And in our place, It almost seems, maybe it's not paradoxical, maybe it says something about monastic life, but a lot of my colleagues in the college, they actually like coming to monastic funerals, and I hope it's not they want to get rid of us, but there seems to be, they say there's something uplifting about this. And usually the abbot preaches really in a very profound, there's something quite moving about the way that he recounts the life of the monk, but I suspect the sense that they're picking up from this is that this is a life that the person has been in this transition

[68:20]

keeping death daily before your eyes, now this transition has moved into the next stage. Apparently, there's something symbolic at a very deep level that's touching these colleagues that come to this, because they find hope in the ritual. And I think Psalm 73, which we prayed, I think it was one of the recent offices here, and we came to the end of it. I talked about it yesterday, in which the person thought that he was envious of the arrogant, he was going to slip and fall, and then he went into the sanctuary and he perceived God. But once he perceived God, the end of that psalm has this wonderful sense of God's always got me by the hand. and that God is going to take me then further on. And it's one of the few places in the Psalter there, Psalm 17, Psalm 49, they're probably only the three places that you have a pretty strong indication of a kind of life after death in the Psalms.

[69:22]

And it takes the form of God having a hold of me, has me by the hand, and is taking me further along. So, we who bury our confreres, families, friends, are ones who are called upon to honor their memory. In the Liturgy of the Hours, we recite the names of monks who have died on a particular day or within the last 30 days. We also recite the names of monks and nuns from houses in our congregation. And this recitation, I think, is a way of honoring them. But more importantly, it's a way that we make intercession for them. And there's something performative about it. A lot of times these names you get, for us, you get, if you're not Polish, it's very difficult to pronounce those Polish names. Some of these guys get up there and they start twisting them around. So one guy, he was going to leave them off. He was just going to say the first name. But there's something left out by that.

[70:27]

It seems somehow, it's not magical, but there's something by the very performance and the recitation of the name that lists the person up and the person is there in some way. And so, I think these intercessory prayers, like for the ancient Mesopotamians, they do have an impact on the lot of the deceased. As we've known through Catholic tradition, we have special devotions, especially on All Souls Day. We may have indulgences, all of these things in which we've recognized that we don't abandon those who have passed on, but it's part of the communion of the saints. So, death is inevitable. It's a reality that we encounter partially throughout our lives. But many would claim that those who know how to live are the ones who know how to die.

[71:28]

And both, we hope, can be done with grace. So, my last questions here then, how do I keep death daily before my eyes? Are there things in my life that I've been hanging on to that I need to let go of? Do I honor the memory of deceased confreres, family members, and friends? is my hope in new life and everlasting life vibrant, so that it has an important place in shaping the day-to-day decisions that I make. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, shall be, world without end. Amen.

[72:18]

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