Sunday, September 5, 2021 (Day 92)https://kuc.org/wp-content/uploads/Sept-092.jpg

Katie Snipes Lancaster

Psalm 92 (from Robert Altar’s 2007 translation)
It is good to acclaim the Lord
and to hymn to Your name, Most High,
to tell in the morning Your kindness,
Your faithfulness in the nights,
on ten-stringed instrument
and on the lute,
on the lyre with chanted sound.
For You made me rejoice, Lord,
through Your acts,
of the work of Your hands I sing in gladness.
How great Your works,
O Lord, your designs are very deep.

An Opening Word
Psalm 92 is a Psalm of praise, thought to be used on the sabbath in a ritual way. I love the musical references, the emphatic way in which God’s goodness in the morning and evening might make all members of God’s heavenly chorus musicians. Get out your ten-stringed instruments, play your lute, demonstrate on your lyre. All of us can rejoice. None of us need to be shy. We are all invited. Now is the time to praise. Now is the time to sing.

Today’s mystic Kathleen Norris, is a more well-known one. She wrote “Cloister Walk” and “Dakota: A Spiritual Geography,” both in the spiritual memoir section of your local library. One reviewer said “Norris’s gentle desert wisdom has the potential to restore lost dimensions of our humanity, to return us to our roots, and to offer possible alternatives to our alienation.” She is an every-day mystic, a poet with an eye for the spark of God lighting the way, someone who can see the glimmer of the spiritual in the most ordinary of days. Born in 1947 and spending most of her childhood in Hawaii, she wrote “Dakota” because of the spiritual experience of being in South Dakota as an adult. About that new home, she said “Like Jacob’s angel, the region requires that you wrestle with it before it bestows a blessing.”

Her blessing below offers the glint of God in our garden variety hope.

Prayer from the Mystics: Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)
Hope
may be
a kind of name
for God.
May we find such hope. Amen.