Psalm 99

Epiphany - Last/Transfiguration - Year C

Psalm 99

Changing media changes meaning.

The media of direct experience rumbles and quakes with no advance warning. This primal uncertainty affects our communal relationships. When powerful people rumble and quake we connect the two experiences into prose and poetry in ways that keep us off-balance.

In trying to enlist power to our side, we set up rules about what will placate an earthquake, what will satisfy a king, and what will domesticate a G*D.

Earthquakes still remain beyond us. Kings, over time, die and/or are overthrown. G*Ds become pets we can bring out to scare other people even as we are comforted.

We find ourselves watching out for G*D, not engaging. We know that enough of us together can deal with a king. We have enough experience to know where earthquakes will most likely happen and choose to be elsewhere or build more securely.

The earth quakes and, in our mind's eye, heaven becomes more stable and reliable. We move from shaky ground to a ground of all being, never recognizing how the physical has become the metaphoric and in turn a story becomes a constraint.