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Episode Transcript:
Welcome to Loving the Imperfect Podcast, a show for laypeople and seekers of deeper contemplation. I'm Brianne Turczynski. For 10 years, I've been studying offerings from holy teachers and holy texts. I'm a journalist who has listened to the stories of many people throughout the years. So I thought it was my turn to share a thing or two about my journey and my thoughts on scripture and holy work from different faith traditions and practices, mostly from Sufi teachers, Buddhists, and Christian mystics. So, join me as we imperfectly and clumsily make our way through each day, mustering up compassion and some words of love for the hours ahead.
Hello, and welcome to Loving the Imperfect. Today we're reading Psalm 101. It is a Psalm from David. Here we go. A reading from Psalm 101:
"I will sing of your love and justice. To you, Lord, I will sing praise. I will be careful to lead a blameless life. Amen. When will you come to me?
I will conduct the affairs of my house with a blameless heart. I will not look with approval on anything that is vile. I hate what faithless people do. I will have no part in it. The perverse of heart shall be far from me. I will have nothing to do with what is evil. Whoever slanders their neighbor in secret, I will put to silence.
Whoever has haughty eyes and a proud heart, I will not tolerate. My eyes will be on the faithful in the land, that they may dwell with me. The one whose walk is blameless, will minister to me. No one who practices deceit will dwell in my house. No one who speaks falsely will stand in my presence.
Every morning, I will put to silence all the wicked in the land. I will cut off every evildoer from the city of the Lord."
Okay. This psalm is about living a blameless life. The notes say that it may have been written early in David's reign, so he's asking God for help to make him worthy of this task, as anyone anointed by God would want to be worthy of that task.
David is a human being, just like you and me, and he's asking for God's help to live a blameless life. To reign over God's people with justice and truth and every morning he says, I will put to silence all the wicked in the land.
If we could just imagine for a minute that David meant, it as the land being himself. It can make the psalm a little bit more relevant for us. So, it seems as though he's saying every morning he will examine himself and silence all the wicked in the land. You could take this as the land is David himself. We're not kings and queens, we're not ruling over any land, as a king or queen would. We have our own life to manage, we have our households, or we have our children, we have our own self to manage.
And so I can only take from this a lesson of examining myself, my psyche, my own heart, and think about and meditate on anything that's been troubling my spirit and keeping me from growth and balance. So, he says, I will put to silence all the wicked in the land. I will cut off every evildoer from the city of the Lord," he says. But a gentler way to say this is that you will let it rest with you.
So sometimes we try to push bad thoughts away, but they always come back if they aren't resolved. And sometimes they can never be resolved. And maybe these are past traumas. They'll always be with you.
Ram Dass was a psychologist and a spiritual teacher. He teaches that we should love every thought and not push it away but love it, and embrace it as our own.
So sometimes we try to push thoughts away because we don't like the way they make us feel. So I might ask myself why that particular thought makes me feel bad. And I dig and dig down until I find the true source of that pain, whatever that is. And once I find it, then I can sit there and I can look at it for a very long time.
And sometimes this takes years. And then, maybe I'll come to some sort of resolution or maybe I won't. Maybe I will have some sort of reconciliation with my pain, but maybe I won't. But at least I've found the source of it and when you find the source of something, and you can name it, then it's usually easier to deal with it.
So, a lot of times we won't resolve these things, and we must let it come to rest within ourselves, and this takes a lot of time. But I think what David promises to do in this psalm, even if he doesn't end up always following through, especially in the case of Bathsheba, I still think that it is a good routine anyone could incorporate into their day, that when we wake up in the morning, we do a little self-examination:
How are we feeling? Is there anything upsetting us or unresolved? Is there anyone we should apologize to or thank? Maybe spend some time every morning writing these things down.
I went to a writer's retreat once with Anne Lamont and some others, and the one speaker was the author Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist's Way. I haven't read it myself, but this book had apparently changed the lives of several people in the audience. In this book, the author speaks at length about writing morning pages. She suggests that the artist, which is every single person on the planet, we're all artists, every morning you write three to four pages of free writing, just basically to get your brain ready for the day. I tried this for a little while but I had filled my notebooks up with what I called nonsense and because most of my entries are intentional and meant to be read by others someday, if anyone's ever interested, I kind of felt like I was just filling my notebooks now with a bunch of thoughtless nonsense, and I didn't want to do that.
So, it kind of fizzled out for me, but if I went at this task of morning pages with David's intention of self-examination, what am I feeling like today? Who do I need to apologize to? Who do I need to thank? These sorts of things. Maybe it would have been more useful for me. There are things that upset me that I carry around all day sometimes.
And maybe if I wrote them down in the morning, it would relieve me. I know that that works for me at night when I'm mad about something. I write it down, whatever I'm mad about, and I write the whole story, the whole event, and why it upset me. And then I tear the sheet of paper out of my notebook, and I throw it away.
And then after this I can finally sleep. And I usually sleep very well after this. So, it's a sort of therapy for me, writing. I think I will try this every morning now, silencing all the wicked in my land, my spirit, all those little voices that keep me from growth and balance. And maybe you'll join me in this.
I hope you find it helpful if you do.
That's it for this week's episode. Join me next week as we go over Psalm 108. Another Psalm from David. I hope you have a great week. Bye bye.
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