And In His Word Is My Trust

Wow, so summer break is getting off to a weird/turbulent/less than optimal start. No job yet, I'm missing Mass/Adoration/Confession/my friends, and today one of my best friends from high school got married. I've talked about this friend before, how she got back together with her abusive marine ex-boyfriend (now husband) when she found out she was pregnant with their child. Well, today they tied the knot in a little civil ceremony which I and our little group of high school friends attended.....

And to think this post could have gotten any more negative, dear me. That was originally going to be the beginning of what would  no doubt have been a supremely depressing blog entry, but after waking up this morning in an unusually good mood (except for all the cat hair on my laptop :) I decided to scrap it, but keep the title. I'm realizing lately that I complain an awful lot, and for about as much as I tell people to offer it up when they're having problems, I so rarely take my own sage advice. Now don't go thinking I've got a swollen head, because I know from when I have offered up my problems what a good remedy it is. It doesn't solve the problems, certainly, but I find that I bear them much more patiently when I do than when I just complain to people about them, and to be sure, I have had a few problems recently. However, as brilliantly as always, I'm ignoring myself and others giving that same good advice to offer my problems up to God, and throwing myself a pity party. Well today I'm not. Today I resolve to offer up whatever ails me in any way.

One of my friends is a fantastic reminder of this, if only because he tells me to offer it up to get back at me for all the times I snottily told him to do so. Oftentimes, if I complain to him, I get told in his best imitation of me to offer it up. This same friend also has an admirable and sometimes amusing love of the Psalms, which has prodded me to flip through them occasionally to see what it is that he loves so much about them. Though his favorite is Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd..."), it is here that our tastes diverge, because my favorite is Psalm 130 ("Out of the depths I call to you, Lord..."). It is a piece in John Rutter's Requiem which I sang in high school, and since taking a look at it through the eyes of faith this past year, my appreciation of the Scripture and the piece has increased manifold.

Through reading and rereading the psalm, I've noticed not only John Rutter's fantastic sensibilities as a composer, but how he uses the music to emphasize the most important parts of the message. He starts the piece with an eerie cello solo, which stretches for six bars and leads into "Out of the deep  have I called unto thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice". Then follows a strangely foreboding "O let thine ears consider well the voice of my complaint" crescendoing through "If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss: O Lord, who may abide it?" as the men pull back to a soft echo of "O Lord, who may abide it?". Suddenly there is a marked increase in volume for "For there is mercy with thee, therefore shalt thou be feared" which again crescendos through "I look for the Lord, my soul doth wait for Him". At that point is a most glorious crescendo into the crux of the entire piece, and indeed, the 130th Psalm. Starting somewhere between mezzo forte and forte and moving to fortissimo in one phrase, we hear "And in His word is my trust". Next is a quiet "My soul fleeeth (flee-eth) unto the Lord, before the morning watch, I say, before the morning watch" which again crescendos to a (marginally) less glorious "O Israel trust in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy. And with Him is plenteous redemption, and He shall redeem Israel from all his sins". Finally, a very soft "Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice" is sung, before the voices quietly fade and the eerie cello starts its solo again.

Though there is much I would like to say about the piece, for now I only want to concentrate on the parts I've called "glorious", because I feel they are most important to this post. There is a reason that Mr. Rutter causes the choir to swell into "And in His word is my trust" and "And with Him is plenteous redemption, and He shall redeem Israel from all his sins", and that is that they are the most important phrases in the psalm. It's not that the other parts are necessarily unimportant, but that those are the most important parts of the psalm's message, i.e., trust in God and His redemption of men. And, getting more to the point today, that is why offering it up (for me, at least) is so crucial to do.

Most of the time, I find myself complaining rather than offering up my problems because complaining is easy, and offering it up means trusting God to take care of the problems in His own time and His own way. Trust is something most people have trouble with, but something we ought to be doing much more of than we do now, especially trusting in God. The redemption bit fits in here because people often don't trust that God will or even can redeem them, but in the psalm, the author does not mean "Israel" as we know it when he says "Israel". It's a metaphor for God's people. At the time, perhaps it meant the Chosen People, the Jews, but through Christ's Passion the pool of chosen people has extended to everyone. Ever.

So, today (and hopefully the rest of this summer) is about offering it up, because that means I'm trusting God, and by trusting God I'm letting Him take care of things the way He intended for them to be taken care of. And no relationship can exist without trust, and if there's no relationship with God, how can He redeem the person who rejects Him? In short, Not complaining---> Offering it up---> Trusting God---> Relationship with God---> Redemption---> Happy Christina. More or less.  :)