I forgot today was a feast day until I had already prayed Matins and Twitter reminded me that today we commemorate Ss. Peter & Paul. Normally I try to be meticulous about observing the feasts of those saints who are most important to me. But getting out of bed this morning was a real struggle, and I was on auto-pilot (and honestly lucky I even mustered the willpower for Morning Prayer). So I read the "wrong" lessons.
But I'm glad I did. The psalter for the day was a boon for my soul. I often find the psalms to be the most nourishing part of the Office—I'd be quite happy to see psalms take a more central place in the next Daily Office lectionary. And today was no different. These two verses (13 & 14) from Psalm 102 especially stuck out:
You will arise and have compassion on Zion, for it is time to have mercy upon her; * indeed, the appointed time has come. // For your servants love her very rubble, * and are moved to pity even for her dust.
'Zion' has ambiguous significance for obvious reasons, but understood as the psalmist's homeland or patria, it makes these verses resonate at a deep psycho-political chord. Visions of rubble seem eerily fitting in our ~*current political moment*~ (grimacing at that phrase). "We"—construed in both parochially narrow and cosmically expansive terms—are dwelling in a landscape of rubble. It isn't from the destruction of any concretely magnificent edifice. Our world has always been broken for those at the margins, whose lives are already crumbling around them under the weight pressing down from above. But now the cracks in the foundation seem to be reaching even up to the very top. Our illusions of safety and accomplishment are collapsing into dust.
I don't think of myself as a particularly patriotic person. Actually probably more anti-patriotic in most cases. But I found my soul groaning, "Yes," at the thought that God's servants love Zion's very rubble. My patriotism (if you can call it that) has long since transformed away from pride in my land, but it retains a love. Not a love of celebration, but a love of lamentation. Pity for the dust to which the world around me is returning. As I sit here pondering the shooting in Annapolis, MD, my heart aches for the broken bodies on the ground. They [We] are the grains of dust into which this world is disintegrating. That is the object of my lamenting love and pity. The res mirabilis of God's salvation story, though, is that the story doesn't end at disintegration. The psalmist goes on in their elegy (vv. 26-28):
They shall perish, but you will endure; they all shall wear out like a garment; * as clothing you will change them, and they shall be changed; // But you are always the same, * and your years will never end. // The children of your servants shall continue, * and their offspring shall stand fast in your sight."
Fresh clothes, firm foundations. There is a horizon of hope. An eschaton of light filtering through the dust settling on the ground. The psalmist calls us to squint through the grit and tears towards a new dawn. Fixing my eyes on that today...