Praying with the Psalms

Maybe it's because we still have Christmas decorations up in the convent (Sr Helena got this great idea about following the Polish tradition and keeping them up until Feb. 2*), but as I have been reflecting on the daily readings, it is still with the image of the child Jesus in my mind.
That led me to a particularly beautiful appreciation of a Psalm I never really appreciated much before. Psalm 89 is David recounting the Lord's promise of a dynasty. (Some contemporary scholars say that the Psalm was a way the later kings had of enforcing their political decisions: "Hey, it was the Lord who said 'I will establish your line forever and make your throne firm'.") But there is a line in Psalm 89 in which God himself imagines David's future, glorious descendant praying, "You are my Father, my God, the rock, my Savior." That verse was part of the Responsorial Psalm on Tuesday, and since then, I just keep going back to it, "witnessing" the first time the child Jesus heard those words from the Scripture and realized that they precisely expressed his own inner life, "listening" to him saying them that first time and repeating them throughout his life, even to Gethsemane.
Can you imagine "the joy before the angels of God" when those inspired words first rose up to heaven from the Incarnate Word? What blessings have we on earth received because Jesus spoke those words of his ancestor David, and what blessings do we unleash when we make those confident words of prayer and praise our own?
You are my Father, my God, the rock, my Savior!



*Thanks be to God, she decided yesterday that the 2nd Week in Ordinary Time is good enough, so we are dismantling things bit by bit now!