Bless The Lord, O My Soul

August 4, 2024 - Psalm 103

When a friend of mine adopted two children over three years ago, they and their partner realized early on just how angry these two small people were. Though they had arrived in a home full of love and stability, the lives of these children up until this point were deeply marked by pain, grief, and anger. Seeking for a way to appropriately release all that explosive energy, my friend began making a regular pilgrimage to the nearby Pacific Ocean. There, on that western-facing shore, the children screamed their pain and anger into the rolling water. My friend encouraged them and invited the children to imagine all their overwhelming emotions being thrown out over the water, washed away in the waves, and churned up into something else more helpful and beautiful.

Some of the Psalms in the Bible might match the emotion of those children. It’s Psalm 22 that Jesus quotes on the cross when he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  

To my ear, today’s psalm does not ring out with the same sorrowful lament, though it names having traveled to the Pit. No, Psalm 103 is a much different psalm with a much different feeling. Indeed, there are a variety of kinds of psalms. There are psalms of praise, petition, lament, thanksgiving, wisdom, trust, and blessing. There are psalms that fit in more than one of those categories, and there are psalms that defy easy categorizing.         

When we pick up the book of psalms, we are picking up not a book written by one author in one sitting. Rather, in the book of psalms we find a library, a collection, a hymnal of songs, poems, and prayers of a wide variety written by many authors over the span of long ago centuries. The psalms not only evidence different emotions. They come from different perspectives throughout time. Indeed, the psalms differ even in their understanding of God and how God works.  

What all these psalms agree on however, is that God is one to whom we all may speak, regardless of what we have to say. If you have ever had an emotion that seemed too big to hold, be it pain, grief, anger, fear, gratitude, or joy, maybe you too can understand the psalmist’s yearning to write it down, sing it out, scream, laugh, dance, or cry.  

From where does all of that emotion come? We can certainly describe it in terms of the chemicals in our brains and the interplay of hormones governed by our heart with the microbes in our guts. That can be one helpful way. Another way might be captured in the Hebrew word nephesh, translated in Psalm 103 as soul. It can be said to mean vitality, life, pleasure, passion, beast, body, and breath. It can be understood to mean the entirety of ourselves. It can be understood to mean the well of our being.   

Bless the Lord, O my soul.

Bless the Lord, O well of my being, says today’s Psalm 103.  

This Psalm spills a good amount of ink describing who this God is to whom we all may speak.  The psalmist says, God is the one from whom all good things come. God forgives our every shortcoming and mistake, says the psalm. God heals our ills and saves our lives. God’s steadfast lovingkindness will hold us for all time. God is someone to be respected. God is ruler over all. God knows we are made of dust, for God was there at the beginning and has been throughout all time.

God is eternity and yet God is present in each passing moment. This psalm says, God is the one who sets things right and does so without punishing us for what we’ve gotten wrong. Rather, God, says this psalm is the one who grants each one what we need, lifting that weight of wrong from our shoulders that it may be as far from our hearts as sunrise is from sunset. With that same power, God renews our strength that, deep in our souls, we may soar like the eagle. Keeping a relationship with God, says the psalm, sets us free to rejoice in God’s steadfast lovingkindness and mercy. A relationship with God will set us free, says the psalm, to rejoice in the preciousness of all our days though the sum of those days may seem to bloom and perish as quickly as the wildflowers in the grass.   

All this I hear the psalmist say. And to all this at least today, my soul nods in agreement. And yet, my soul nods in agreement with souls who claim, to speak of God is to fail to name God. And yet, my soul nods in agreement with souls who claim, though we would spill all our words, we would never fully describe God.[1]  

For me, the longer I live, the more I learn, the longer I pray, the more I sing, cry, laugh, and dance, and the more I pay attention to the world around me, the more humbled I am at how much more there is to know, see, and do. What, who, and where is God are questions I hope I ask all my life. Days like today I remember, God is who and what saves my life. Like the psalmist, I believe God is who and what sets me free to be fully alive.

I believe God is the force through which I can touch eternity in the beauty of a single passing moment.  God is the one in whom we live and breathe and have our being. God is the one who reminds me how astonishing it is to be alive. In difficult moments or mundane moments that can be hard to remember. When the panic or the grief is too hard to bear. In those moments, I remind myself that God hears my every prayer even the ones screamed at the top of my lungs or cried into pillows or in sighs too exhausted for tears. In those moments, if I’m lucky, I remember that God is as present with me in grief as in astonishment. In those moments, with a little help, I can remember that even though suffering is real, so are the tiny miracles of this life like sandwiches, big dramatic clouds, cool breezes, fresh water, and opportunities to gather like this together in the presence of God. 

Life can be both and life can be hard and beautiful both. God is in both and in those hard moments, if I’m lucky, I can sometimes remind myself of when I remembered how truly astonishing it is to be alive. With a little help, I can take myself back to the moment eleven years ago now when I was standing pregnant in a field in Iowa at 5 o-clock in the morning watching a blood moon eclipse and listening to the nearby woods erupt with owls hooting and coyotes howling. In the presence of that rare lunar event, I thought about how valuing a single passing moment can be like slowing down enough to notice eternity shimmering behind the sands of time.   

I thought about Ecclesiastes claiming all is vapor, vanishing dust and yet it is all to be enjoyed. I thought about a slam poet who once crowed, “We’re every age at once and tucked inside ourselves like Russian nesting dolls.”  

Bless the Lord, O my soul. Bless, indeed, the Holy Eternal One who is a force much more powerful than me that moves throughout the universe and yet, counts each speck of stardust precious.                   

Bless the Lord, O my soul? Why would one such as that ever need or want my blessing? What does it even mean to bless?  

Maybe it means simply to kneel and say thank you. Maybe blessing God means connecting with God.  Maybe blessing God means trusting God with the honest state of our souls, whether they are in astonishment or in deep ache. Maybe blessing God opens us up to being fully alive. Maybe when we bless God, we are the ones who are blessed.  And our being blessedly more fully alive, blesses God, the one to whom we may always speak and the one in whose lovingkindness we are set free.   

I don’t know what opens up your heart. I don’t know what makes your soul sing. I don’t know what connects you to that deep well of gratitude that lingers even in the midst of suffering.  

All I know is there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. All I know is whatever we are going through, God is one to whom we may speak.

All I know is to Bless the Lord with all my soul.                        

MIBS. Amen.

[1] Here I’m thinking of the book I’m re-reading How (Not) to Speak of God by Peter Rollins.