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Psalm 91  

¹ He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, *
abides under the shadow of the Almighty.
² He shall say to the Lord,
"You are my refuge and my stronghold, *
my God in whom I put my trust."
³ He shall deliver you from the snare of the hunter *
and from the deadly pestilence.
⁴ He shall cover you with his pinions,
and you shall find refuge under his wings; *
his faithfulness shall be a shield and buckler.
⁵ You shall not be afraid of any terror by night, *
nor of the arrow that flies by day;
⁶ Of the plague that stalks in the darkness, *
nor of the sickness that lays waste at mid-day.
⁷ A thousand shall fall at your side
and ten thousand at your right hand, *
but it shall not come near you.
⁸ Your eyes have only to behold *
to see the reward of the wicked.
⁹ Because you have made the Lord your refuge, *
and the Most High your habitation,
¹⁰ There shall no evil happen to you, *
neither shall any plague come near your dwelling.
¹¹ For he shall give his angels charge over you, *
to keep you in all your ways.
¹² They shall bear you in their hands, *
lest you dash your foot against a stone.
¹³ You shall tread upon the lion and adder; *
you shall trample the young lion and the serpent under your feet.
¹⁴ Because he is bound to me in love,
therefore will I deliver him; *
I will protect him, because he knows my Name.
¹⁵ He shall call upon me, and I will answer him; *
I am with him in trouble;
I will rescue him and bring him to honor.
¹⁶ With long life will I satisfy him, *
and show him my salvation.

I had just spent a week hunkering down and making contingency plans to work from home before the CUNY Chancellor said that everyone was going online because of the Corona Virus. At first it was faculty and students; I was neither, I am considered staff.  However, because I had upper respiratory stuff going on, I wanted to make contingency plans to work from home; my Assistant Director and I met and we began to think about ways to go virtual with the Honors Program I run at Hunter College.   I was not nervous about what was going on, I was only trying to be proactive because I knew that things could change rather fast, and I have many responsible hats I have to wear.  
 
On Saturday when I first read Psalm 91, I froze.  My first response was OMG! God this is happening now!!!  I started to feel anxiety since the Mothers had just announced that we would have church online.  What?  Church online?  Knowing that I would not be singing along with the choir, or shaking hands during ‘the peace’, or even the special Lord’s Prayer when we hold hands with each other, in those beautiful hand-held lines, almost like a bridge to heaven-singing the Lord’s Prayer while looking at the altar and that big majestic stained glass window of Jesus (a moment I always feel God’s presence). I have to admit, I felt a moment of panic. 
 
I re-read Psalm 91 on Sunday after online church (which was not so bad, I thought) and realized that verses 1-6 talked about God giving us refuge and delivering us from “the snare of the hunter and from the deadly pestilence.”  As the weekend passed, I knew that the virus was the snare of the hunter. The more I heard the news, the more I felt compelled to hear it, and the more I would focus on God, prayer and trust in God.   I could not control what was happening, but I could do my best to stay home and look after my parents, take care of myself and my partner and make sure that everyone who lived in my home had the resources they needed to work from home.   I have high wireless connectivity in my building, and my tenants have a guest pass.  One of my tenants set up a google calendar to schedule all of us, so as to not overtax the internet.  How cool?  This would not have happened otherwise, but we learned to figure things out. 
 
Verses 7-14 mirrors what is going on currently.  Yes, there is a virus, and many will succumb to the virus. However, the more you grow in God’s love and share with your community and help each other out, the more things will get better sooner and then we can begin to win the fight with the “snare of the hunter.”  I am opting not to listen to the news obsessively, except to keep informed every day, but I do not want to panic.  Let’s spend our efforts in “self-study,” and looking within.  What is it about what we are doing now, or our eating or our communicating, that we can work on a little harder to change for the better, to serve in God’s calling?  Yoga rules from the Eight Limbs of Yoga call it Svadhyaya, which means to intentionally find self-awareness in all our activities and efforts, even to the point of welcoming and accepting limitations.  By practicing svadhyaya, the desire of worldly objects diminishes and taste for spirituality increases.
 
I look forward to seeing you all in-person soon.  In the meantime, let's practice self-study. God will take care of us. Now we owe it to him, to give back and help others escape from “the snare of the hunter and from the deadly pestilence”.

Mark 6:30-46

³⁰ The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. ³¹He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. ³²And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. ³³Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. ³⁴As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. ³⁵When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; ³⁶send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.’ ³⁷But he answered them, ‘You give them something to eat.’ They said to him, ‘Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii^* worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?’ ³⁸And he said to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and see.’ When they had found out, they said, ‘Five, and two fish.’ ³⁹Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. ⁴⁰So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. ⁴¹Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all.⁴²And all ate and were filled; ⁴³and they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. ⁴⁴Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men. 

⁴⁵ Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. ⁴⁶After saying farewell to them, he went up on the mountain to pray.

Here we have the miracle of the loaves and fishes.  What transpires in this passage is clear.  And as I read the passage, I find two messages, one stated clearly and one implied.  I do not know if we believe in miracles in these days of science.  How do we distinguish a modern miracle from a coincidence?  But dividing five loaves of bread and two fishes among five thousand cannot be a coincidence.  Nor do I find anything in the passage to suggest a metaphor, another favorite piece of modern sophistry to explain what we, in an age of science, struggle to understand.

I must examine myself daily to appreciate the altar to science that I build between me and my God.  I find that my work on that altar makes it grow higher and stronger almost by the hour, and I am afraid that I cannot, without faith and love, tear it apart.

For me, the second message comes through seeing just what Jesus does through faith and love.  When he is trying to rest and take care of himself and his disciples, he nevertheless feels compassion for a great crowd.  He becomes the shepherd to a flock of five thousand, speaking to them and feeding them.  Nowhere in the passage does he ask the lepers to seat themselves in a separate section.  He feeds the flock both spiritually and physically. And then, not having rested himself, he does not disperse the flock but sees it members safely off before retreating for his own spiritual nourishment through his prayers.

Psalm 119

⁹⁷ Oh, how I love your law! *
all the day long it is in my mind.

⁹⁸ Your commandment has made me wiser than my enemies, *
and it is always with me.

⁹⁹ I have more understanding than all my teachers, *
for your decrees are my study.

¹⁰⁰ I am wiser than the elders, *
because I observe your commandments.

¹⁰¹ I restrain my feet from every evil way, *
that I may keep your word.

¹⁰² I do not shrink from your judgments, *
because you yourself have taught me.

¹⁰³ How sweet are your words to my taste! *
they are sweeter than honey to my mouth.

¹⁰⁴ Through your commandments I gain understanding; *
therefore I hate every lying way.

¹⁰⁵ Your word is a lantern to my feet *
and a light upon my path.

Lenten reflection on Psalm 119:97-105
Janet Kaplan
 
Dearest all,
 
The anonymous writer of today’s psalm, the longest one in the Bible, has much to teach us about the nature of prayer.  The psalmist writes in supplication to God and in praise of God, oftentimes in the very same verse. The psalmist addresses, seemingly at once, God (the “you” of the psalm) and the law (in Hebrew, torah, which can refer to the five books of Moses in the Old Testament or the torah given to Moses by God in the wilderness). The writer of Psalm 119 boasts more insight than all the teachers, more wisdom than any enemy, more understanding than the elders—and then seems to grow humble enough to write that God’s torah, God’s word, “is a lamp for my feet.” Such duality! Or is it?
 
We’re in a world that seems utterly topsy-turvy. The news grows more dire, we’re asked to “self-quarantine” or to practice “social distancing,” to avoid all means of transportation except for our own cars, if we own them, or to go only where our feet can convey us. We’ve gone from not partaking of the holy wine or of one another’s precious hands during the Lord’s prayer, to having a shuttered church…. Or is it shuttered? I suppose that depends on what we mean by “church.”
 
I’m not going to lie. My life feels so upside-down right now that if Deacon John had assigned me  a section from the book of Job, I’d have written it in a heartbeat. On the one hand, on-campus classes were cancelled for the rest of the semester, which means that I don’t have to schlep to work but can teach online from home. On the other hand, just two days after this news came, one of the four family elders in my care had a stroke and is now in the hospital being treated for that—and for bacterial pneumonia, too. Now, of course, I have plenty of time to visit her in the hospital and to visit her sister, my other aunt, who’s been homebound for nearly a year.
 
The emergency room was as packed as ever with the desperately ill. Frantic nurses and attendants, all of them gloved and masked, monitored, took vitals, changed bedpans, whisked the direst into isolation, wheeled new patients in on stretchers…. No one wanted to be there, and yet somehow there we were, together in the messy, precarious, dangerous heart of God’s world. Two days later, with a room finally assigned to my beloved 89-year-old Aunt Rhoda and enough testing to make the diagnoses, and with her resting comfortably enough to complain about the food, I took my exhausted self home. I decided to take the local R train most of the way from Queens to Brooklyn, hoping to avoid the Friday evening rush-hour crowds. The subways were emptier than I've ever seen them during a rush hour, with maybe one or two people per long bench in the car I happened to enter. Suddenly, a man with a guitar and an amp began playing--Beatles, Jim Croce, Bob Marley. And then “How Great Thou Art.” How Great Thou Art!--with magically gorgeous strumming, singing and even whistling. In a moment, we were all stunned out of our fear and self-protecting corners, just listening, tapping out the rhythms, humming, singing along, smiling together.
 
When I got home I did what every hospital staff and visitor was advised to do: I stripped down, threw all my clothes into a laundry bag, showered, got warm, ate a good dinner, and went to bed early. I hugged my guy, our cats hopped onto the bed to welcome me home kitten-style, and I fell asleep. Am I afraid that I might have caught something unthinkable? Kinda… Is the coronavirus horrible? Absolutely awful. But at this moment I feel utterly grateful for my life and its blessings. After all, in this one little life, I’ve gone from wretched alienation from God to the unshakable experience of God’s presence and grace through Christ. I have an at-home silent meditation practice of Centering Prayer. I’m loved and, more often than not, I know it. Through the most miraculous miracle of all, God is steadily opening my heart to return that love, and more. And I have a church, our church: from the Greek, kyriakos, “belonging to the Lord” and ekklēsía, community, “church.”
 
Duality. Good and evil. Life and death. Right-side up. Topsy-turvy. The whole story. Job never stopped praising God. Jesus gave his life for us. When we wish one another peace on Sundays, we’re offering God’s peace, or, in Hebrew, shalom—a word that means peace and, also, wholeness.
 
I suppose that all of this is to say that I miss each and every one of you—even (especially!) those of you I haven’t met yet. And yet we are together, even now, where we always were, one in Christ.
 
Shalom,
Janet