The original Emo

Okay. In light of that last post. Lest you think it's all peaceful and beautiful in here - that is, in my head - please hear me: It's not.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes I'm so grateful. I've experienced wonderful, miraculous, good things in my short life. Love what I have been given. Love what I can look forward to. Love love love.

Other times, it's like: I'm thirty. F#%*(!!!!

I admit: I am grateful and I am terribly anxious about this milestone. There is barely a second between those two diverging feelings. I suppose that part of growing up is loving yourself better and that means accepting your somewhat nonsensical nature. But don't quote me on that one.

I've been reading a lot of the Psalms lately and I recognize the simultaneous lamenting and praising. It's freeing to bring all that you are to a just and faithful God. all. that. i. am. just as i am. completely. Listen to the psalmists go: God you are faithful, you are good, how long do I have to wait for you? I'm poor and need, please come quickly and destroy my adversaries.

It's almost embarrassing the way those sentiments and pleas all run together side by side urgently. I say 'almost' because I actually recognize myself in those words, although I may not have the sensitivity or courage to say them. I relate. It's altogether the most honest and most real. But it might not be the most natural (see Thurman below).

I submit to you, the psalmists are the utmost emo - if not the original.

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Our Father, we turn to Thee in the quietness of this meditation period. It is but natural that we expose to Thee the things in us that seems most worthy and good that we may delight Thy Spirit and joy Thy Heart. The unworthy and the ugly things in us we almost instinctively seek to hide, to cover up, that we may seem pleasing in Thy Sight. But deep within us we know that this is not enough. We know that somehow we must be totally exposed to Thee, holding back nothing, seeking refuge behind no protecting screen or darkening shadows. We do not keep back the unsightly from Thee because we cannot trust Thee, dare not run the risk, but because we cannot deny the urge to offer in prayer the best that is in us.

Teach us to know that Thy love is so whole and so healing that nothing less than all of us can rise to meet Thine all-encompassing care. Teach us to share with Thee the good and the bad in us, the ugly and the beautiful, the clean and the sordid, the success and the failure - all, everything complete in every part. With penitence for fumblings, failures, ignorances and sins; with thanksgiving for directness, successes, knowledge and rightness, we lay bare all that we are to Thy love and Thy understanding, O God our Father.

- Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, p. 31, emphases mine