Lent
March 14, 2018

 Scripture Reading: Psalm 51:1-12

You desire truth in the inward being;
   therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
   wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Let me hear joy and gladness;
   let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins,
   and blot out all my iniquities. –Psalm 51:6-9

Hamlet Act I Scene III: Polonius says: “This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day. Thou canst not then be false to any man/Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!”

Think Shakespeare was acquainted with Psalm 51?

The need to lie to others stems from lying to oneself. If we can be honest with ourselves, we can deal with anything outside ourselves that might tempt us to lie to someone else.

I have had the same hairdresser for some 40 years. He became my next-door neighbor when he had a booth in a beauty shop. He now owns his own salon and has moved to a bigger and better home. With my hair washed and wrapped in a towel, I walked from the sink to the chair while he was on the phone. It gave me time to study myself in the full-length mirror I faced. I did not like what I saw. When he walked up behind me and removed the towel, I said that I look old and haggard and he said, “I can’t do anything about that” with the unspoken understanding that he could do something about my hair. I knew that too. Accepting life as it meets us is a decision point. We can live with what we find, do everything in our power to change it, or repurpose ourselves to attain our goal all choice dependent on our being truthful to ourselves in the first place.

I have never particularly been super concerned about my looks and do recognize aging as a normal process. My larger concern now is the state of justice or lack thereof in our world today and those same choices apply to doing justice. I am incapable of learning to live with the injustice I see but I am also tired of what seems like beating my head against a brick wall to overcome it. I have thus decided I may need to seek new approaches. For example, with all the divisiveness in our world today, I am becoming more and more committed to finding the things on which people agree and building from that common ground for the common good.

Prayer: Lord, open our hearts to finding more productive ways of doing justice. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights are reserved.