If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

The psalm passage for this Sunday (October 3, my 57th birthday actually) is from psalm 95: 1-2, 6-7, 8-9

Come let us sing joyfully to the Lord; let us acclaim the Rock of our salvation. Let us greet him with thanksgiving; let us joyfully sing psalms to him.

Come let us bow down in worship; let us kneel before the Lord who made us. For he is our God, and we are the people he shepherds, the flock he guides.

Oh, that today you would hear his voice; "harden not your hearts as at Meribah, as in the day of Massah in the desert, where your fathers tempted me; they tested me though they had seen my works."

 Refrain: If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

Usually every year around the time of my birthday, I try to reflect so that I don't just let the year pass unconsidered and unreviewed. I think especially as I get older that I find the journey is more and more about letting go and not letting my heart be hardened by how rough and disappointing the passage can sometimes  seem to be. It is indeed important that I keep my mind and my heart open and really hear the voice of God speaking within me: Spirit to spirit, Heart to heart. It means learning to receive the grace in each moment especially the ones that "feel" less overtly graced; for indeed all moments hold a gift to be received. Yes, I know it is sometimes hard to be joyful about challenging events. Yet, it is these moments of difficulty and challenge that make us grow and help us to develop fully into the wonderful reflections of God we were created from all eternity to be.

Like baby birds we would never leave our warm cozy niches if God or Life didn't throw us out of the nest and let us experience really falling. Until we are really falling (usually experienced as failing), we are often unmotivated to use or even try our wings. When we are plummeting to earth, we have no choice but to fly or die. Spiritually we come to this impasse as well. Will we let out spirits soar and walk into the incarnationally miraculous or will we let ourselves die because gravity was not what we expected? I am, of course, speaking metaphorically, but I think the image is real. We all have after a certain time in our lives a pretty fixed idea of who we are and of how our lives should be. Unfortunately sometimes these ideas have no true grounding in reality before God. We even in midlife and beyond often have much work to do discovering and celebrating our true selves, the self our Creator breathed us to be from our loving inception.

We have a preset idea of what success and failure are meant to be and we have a hard time redefining things for ourselves. Some of the unnecessary suffering in our lives is due to this hardness of heart. We have come to understand our lives and ourselves in limited ways and to understand who we are by what we do rather than by who we were created to be. We want things to be clear and straightforward and yet we were built to be creatures of awe and mystery. We want what we want when and how we want it, yet consider ourselves to be people of grace open to God and all his ways (until of course his ways are not our ways). We are silly creatures sometimes, aren't we?

So let us come joyfully to God who is the immutable Rock that saves us from ourselves and our inconsistencies and changing definitions of truth. God is the solid Truth within us that remains unchanging as we try on new false definitions over the journey only to finally uncover what we knew all along: we are spirit born of Spirit, we come from God and we are only whole when we are one with I AM WHO AM whose Living Breath alone defines us. Our spirits should then erupt with joy and gratitude, a gratitude that is a deep and lasting thankfulness for the wonder and mystery of our own creation, for the gift of being who we uniquely are. We really are marvelous creatures born of ineffable Love.

Come let us indeed bow down in humility and celebrate this mystery, this gift that is Life. Let us not be stiff-necked or stubborn-hearted, let us just be who we are and let us let God be God in wonder, awe and Mystery. Let us allow ourselves to be shepherded, for even though we think otherwise, we often do not know the way, we only think we do. Let us grow still and quiet when we thirst rather than grumbling,complaining, and quarrelsome. Let us share our thirst with God, trusting he already knows our needs and has already answered them through blessing us with all we need and so much more.

Let us not need to test or try God, let us yield and trust that Love cannot be other than Loving. Then we can  go forth through all our deserts, all our cold dark nights, knowing the well of Living Water is already within us. Out thirst will be met and all our heart's deepest needs as well. For as much as we may thirst for God and for many things in Life, God thirsts more in Love for union with us and this passion is a wellspring of hope that can surely be trusted and celebrated as a  Holy Light in every darkness.

Let us indeed not harden our hearts but rejoice that God is a God of infinite nearness whose Spirit is even in  the breath within us. Today let us indeed hear the voice of God anew speaking to our hearts: and let us respond joyfully genuinely: Speak, Lord, your servant is listening with an open and willing heart!