A poetic reflection on the Venite (Psalm 95)
Although now, the Daily Office
is an ingrained piece of my daily prayer life,
many years ago,
it was a new practice for me.
As a fairly new Episcopalian,
although I knew chanting parts of Morning and Evening Prayer
happened in some places,
it wouldn’t have been something that happened
in a small church
in a small town
in rural Missouri…
and I could barely read music anyway.
Yet something was gnawing in my brain
and whispering to me
that putting prayer to a tune
would be a different way of praying for me,
and perhaps I would learn something
about the old adage
that “He who sings prays twice.”
I knew nothing back then
about the standard chant tones
that we hear in sung Morning Prayer
and Evensong.
Then one day as I was saying the Venite,
and I could feel my body nodding to its cadence,
the wildest thing
swept across my brain
in flashing neon lights…
I suddenly realized
that with only a little bit of wordsmithing,
it was possible
to sing the Venite
to Willie Nelson’s
“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”
And so for several weeks,
when I’d say Morning Prayer at home
to God and my dogs,
I’d sing my “Willie Nelson Venite,”
and figured that since the dogs seemed pleased,
God would be fine with it too.
Now some would find that disrespectful,
or at the very least, a little odd,
but it worked for me.
Somehow the dilapidated soundboard
on Willie’s guitar
with the gaping, growing, decades old hole
became a metaphor for the beauty
that can come from brokenness
if we can allow ourselves
to make music through it.
So even though
we don’t normally sing the Venite in Lent
I’ve been singing it that way
to God and my dogs this season
simply because it feels right
after living through a pandemic
and in the midst of the polarizing tension
I feel in daily living these days.
For what good is Lent anyway,
if we can’t take the broken soundboards
of our lives,
and hear sweet comfort
in the music that rises from the debris
of our broken promises and lost loves
through the shattered world
that led to the Crucifixion?
Daily Office Readings for Friday, March 10, 2023: AM Psalm 95 69:1-23(24-30)31-38; PM Psalm 73 Jer. 5:1-9; Rom. 2:25-3:18; John 5:30-47
Image: Willie Nelson’s famous old guitar, “Trigger.” Photo by Mike Prosser, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, through a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
