In Which the Bible Shows Me I’m Part of the Problem

​My morning prayer is a jumble of practices: silence, chanting/reading a psalm, contemplation of a sacred text, even journaling, all in the name of “gazing into God.” Anything could pop up and surprise the hell out of me.
 
Recently, that anything involved a passage in Psalm 44 that could have been ripped from today’s editorials. That wasn’t the surprise. The surprise was what I was asked to do with it.
 
The psalm begins with praise to God for help in victories, defense against enemies, etc. (I’m using Nan Merrill’s compelling version of the psalms in her book Psalms for Praying: An Invitation to Wholeness.) Then the text takes a dark turn:
 
Without your saving grace, we come in conflict with our neighbors,
We fear all who seem different from us.
We seek to better ourselves at the expense of other nations,
We become arrogant and greedy.
Our spirit weakens as we attack others; we become deaf and blind
To the cries of those oppressed,
At the sight of those wronged.
 
Doesn’t this sound like America’s public square in 2024? Goodness knows, my adversaries “fear all who seem different.” Much of Donald Trump’s platform sounds like “we seek to better ourselves at the expense of other nations.” My God, we are a mess, all right.
 
But then a voice popped up in my head: That’s not good enough. You’ve got your own work to do.
 
So I went through the passage again. After each line I asked myself and/or God, How am I like this?
 
The answers weren’t hard to see. “We fear all who seem different from us”: maybe many MAGA folks fear others who aren’t white, Christian, or heterosexual, but I fear the MAGA folks. “We become arrogant”: I sure do, especially when trying to defend one of my cherished (and, naturally, correct) opinions. “Our spirit weakens as we attack others”: I’m reminded of that sense of needing a shower after a long bitchfest about “them.”
 
I didn’t resolve to do anything about these shortcomings. For the time being, I just want to hold them, look at them, as a deep reminder that I am part of the problem too. If that truth makes its way to my heart, just maybe I move a tiny bit further toward being part of the solution.
 
Small potatoes, yes. What if every American did this?