Gratitude like Gravy

I can tell my heart is off, like lunch meat starting to slime, when I crack open the Psalms and grow irritated at the instrumental excess (harps, bells, cymbals, trumpets, shofars, tambourines, lyres). I mean, I haven’t sung a single note since last Sunday. Even then, I was stuffing my toddler’s mouth with goldfish to keep her content while doubting the worship authenticity of the expensively dressed women to my right and left. 

My slimy heart is reason to pause. Why don’t I feel at home in Psalms when it is a spacious four-season’s room; a place to live, whatever the weather? It meets believers situated absolutely anywhere on the emotions wheel; a crinkly, dog-eared lifeline for both the plucky and war-torn soul. I’ve been absent from the Psalter’s choir and a lopsided lover. I present the Lord with a cornucopia of petitions and near-laments (with too much whine), and zeroish praise. I’m ashamed I can’t recall my last thankful word that ran upwards. 

Christmas mercifully makes this plain. I can hardly wonder at Christ’s incarnation when my mind is a Pinterest board for another kingdom. It’s hard to care about a stable and manger when I’m comparing how good I look next to other almost-forty-year-olds. I am not pondering divine mysteries like Mary, but collecting compliments in my private mental scrapbook and envying the feats, silky words, and thicker hair of others. 

God have mercy. I’d like to ditto Flannery O’Connor’s prayer journal on this one: 

“Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and myself is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.” 

Luke’s ten lepers, although thankless, were still healed (Luke 17). There is mercy at the table for dogs. My praiseless tongue can be restored, even if I’ve licked one too many envelopes addressed to myself. He won’t reject my immature efforts, even if I sound like a kindergartener reading Dick and Jane. Immanuel has come to bestow the lame with wide strides, the blind with neons and pastels, and the thankless lips a praise that spills over as luxuriously as the gravy on winter potatoes.