Can Ordinary People be Holy? with Psalm 80

Hello and thank you for tuning in! I'm Brianne Turczynsk, a teacher, an author/journalist, a filmmaker, and a student of mysticism in the Christian tradition. Mysticism is the part of all religions and practices that unifies all people and practices, breaking down the walls around our beliefs built by religious dogma. Mysticism bypasses dogma and invites everyone to the same table. In this episode, we cover Psalm 80 and discuss what it is to be holy, and how we can walk daily carrying the truth of our holiness and that of everyone we meet, including our coworkers and employees. I also talk a bit about gratitude, and how saying thank you can help bring you back to your center.
In our next episode, we'll cover Psalm 87.
Blessings,
Brianne

For more information about me and my work, please visit www.brianneturczynski.com or www.lovingtheimperfect.com

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Loving the Imperfect. I'm Brianne Turczynski, your host. This is a podcast that covers every seventh psalm. So, every time we meet, I read a psalm and then I talk about some things that I thought of when I read the psalm. So, it's a podcast about Christianity and looking at Christianity and all the other religions and practices through a mystical lens. And it's about books and history and sometimes the garden. At the heart of me, I am a storyteller. And so, in every episode I try to incorporate a personal story, something that happened to me that week that made me think of something from the Psalm, or some sort of message that I’m trying to relay in these episodes. So that's what you get when you listen to these episodes. 

Sometimes these stories come from books I've read. A lot of the books I read are either spiritual books or classic literature—something you might find in the Norton Anthology, so there are a lot of different topics I'll cover in each episode. I thank you for listening every week.

I just want to introduce myself again. I have my master's in education and a bachelor's in history and English.

I’m a writer. I've been published in various literary magazines for my poetry and short fiction and nonfiction. And I've won a couple awards through Oakland University. For a while there, I was a local historical journalist. I wrote a book that people in this area enjoyed called Detroit's Lost Poletown. Then last year I finished a documentary that has been invited to four film festivals, but all the while through that, for the past 10 years, I was studying scripture and studying holy work from different religions and different practices. I wanted to be a priest—you can be a priest if you're a woman in the Episcopal church.

I thought that was my calling, to go to seminary school and be a priest or a deacon or a hospital chaplain. I still think about that sometimes, but just recently I started teaching again. I taught in high schools for a while, and now I teach ESL for adults, that is English as a second language. I get to meet people from all over the world and we talk about food, and they teach me a lot about their culture and how they grew up.

It's very eye-opening, and I really enjoy it a lot. So that's the short version of my background. Thank you for giving me the opportunity again, to tell my stories. In every episode, I'm talking about how to look at Christianity through a mystical lens. I think that mysticism of all religions and all practices string all the practices and religions together and unify what has been broken over centuries and centuries of dogma in all religions.  And so that's why I gravitate toward mysticism. To me, mysticism is knowing that God is everywhere around you. God is in the air we breathe, and God is the earth on which we stand. And God is in the food we eat. And even in the chairs that we're sitting on.

 So anyway, let's get to it.

Today we're reading Psalm 80, and this is another psalm from Asaph.

A reading from Psalm 80:

1 Hear us, Shepherd of Israel,
    you who lead Joseph like a flock.
You who sit enthroned between the cherubim,
    shine forth 2 before Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh.
Awaken your might;
    come and save us.

3 Restore us, O God;
    make your face shine on us,
    that we may be saved.

4 How long, Lord God Almighty,
    will your anger smolder
    against the prayers of your people?
5 You have fed them with the bread of tears;
    you have made them drink tears by the bowlful.
6 You have made us an object of derision[b] to our neighbors,
    and our enemies mock us.

7 Restore us, God Almighty;
    make your face shine on us,
    that we may be saved.

8 You transplanted a vine from Egypt;
    you drove out the nations and planted it.
9 You cleared the ground for it,
    and it took root and filled the land.
10 The mountains were covered with its shade,
    the mighty cedars with its branches.
11 Its branches reached as far as the Sea,[c]
    its shoots as far as the River.[d]

12 Why have you broken down its walls
    so that all who pass by pick its grapes?
13 Boars from the forest ravage it,
    and insects from the fields feed on it.
14 Return to us, God Almighty!
    Look down from heaven and see!
Watch over this vine,
15     the root your right hand has planted,
    the son[e] you have raised up for yourself.

16 Your vine is cut down, it is burned with fire;
    at your rebuke your people perish.
17 Let your hand rest on the man at your right hand,
    the son of man you have raised up for yourself.
18 Then we will not turn away from you;
    revive us, and we will call on your name.

19 Restore us, Lord God Almighty;
    make your face shine on us,
    that we may be saved.

Okay,

So, the psalmist in Psalm 80 is distraught. Because it seems as though God has left them or their city.  And though God spent generations building it up—this city—according to the psalmist, now God has, quoting from verse 12, God has broken down its walls so that all who pass by pick its grapes, bores from the forest ravage it, and insects from the field feed on it. 

And the psalmist asks for God to let the face of God shine on him and his city again.  So, let us imagine that the city is us. Let us imagine this because then, we can take the more relevant, true meaning away from this psalm. It says this psalm was written after the northern kingdom of Israel was defeated and its people deported to Assyria.

So, it serves its purpose, literally and historically.  But we are going to look at it figuratively.  Like all the psalms we've covered so far, that's just how I look at the Bible, really. I mean, it makes sense to look at it literally, sometimes, within the historical context, but if you're not studying the history of the Bible, then it makes way more sense for us to take it figuratively, a lot of what is said. The Bible can morph into relevancy for every generation, no matter how our world changes. And I believe this because it is a book filled with human stories that reveal to us the human condition throughout time. So that is the beauty of the Bible. To see only a literal meaning from it would stymie the beauty and art form of storytelling within holy texts. For it to do its holy work for people all over the world.

This feeling the psalmist writes of on a grander scale can be felt in the minuscule. It is what the saints and sages have called spiritual dryness it has also been written about as a spiritual wilderness when we feel God is far away from us and the world and all its temptations are pressing down on us, and we sometimes fall into temptation or get sucked into drama or our old ways that we were so good at avoiding or staying away from just last week.

I have had this come over me many times. One day, God feels very close as if the veil between the spiritual world and this world has been lifted and everything and all meaning and all purpose is clear and my heart is full, and then the next day it's all gone and I feel spiritually cold.

In these moments,  I have found that taking little moments out of my day to say thank you to God or to the spirit of love or to the Holy Spirit, or to nature,  to my mom, to my dad, to my friends, whatever. To say thank you, to verbalize my gratitude, is the offering my heart is longing for.

And so, for you, to say thank you and to verbalize your gratitude, is the offering your heart is longing for.

In indigenous cultures, as most of us know, they would make an offering to the earth when they took anything from the planet. They would burn tobacco or put a little tobacco near a tree or in the water. And this offering was their way of giving thanks. I have found that an offering of thanks lifts the veil for me once more.

And lately, I have been doing something that has really put many things in perspective. Gratitude is one, an offering. This next part will infuse the gratitude I just spoke about and make it real for you. Here we go: the next time you're on a walk out in nature or looking at a river, a lake, or an ocean, I want you to pretend that you are Jesus or just yourself.  Whatever works for you for this. And pretend that your true relative, someone connected to you by blood and breath created all that you see before you.

And wasn't this relative such a great artist?

Think of all you're seeing, the trees and the river and the ocean or just the sky and the clouds.  And really try to imagine that your relative, someone that you love very deeply, or maybe never met, but is part of you by blood and breath, created it all just so you have something beautiful to look at.

Now, because you see your relative's hand in all creation, it makes you very unique that you see, and you know this. The light will shine bright in you as you walk the earth carrying this wisdom with you.  And you will see all creation, humans, and even your enemies differently.

You will then realize that all humanity, all your relatives, they too are all spirit and blood and breath.

I had a beautiful dream the other night that I could see everyone's guardian angel. Around everyone's head we had halos like the ones drawn on holy people in paintings, but these halos were big and gleaming with prism-like transparency and bright white light coming out of it—like radiating out of everyone's head and everyone had one. 

So, doesn’t this mean that we are holy beings? It does. It does mean that.  If we could only believe it, maybe we'd all see this. And there would finally be peace in the world. I mean, if we could imagine that that really existed, that that was really the case, that every single person—we couldn't see it, it was invisible—but they all had halos around their head because we are all holy beings.

We truly are holy beings.  So if you believe that there's stuff going on in the ether that we cannot see, that we aren't aware of, because there is, I mean science has proven that there's a lot going on in the ether that we can't see with our physical eyes. If this were the case, if you could see everyone's halo around their head, really, if this were real—maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't know; it was a dream. But wouldn't that make you feel differently about every single person that you came across?

I think it would. For me, it would.  I have trouble sometimes. Somebody makes you mad or frustrates you, and we forget that we are holy people. We need to treat each other in a holy way, really. And so, I wanted to leave you with that image. Try to imagine everyone you encounter as holy today and see how it changes your thoughts on people that are much different than you.

And some people you'll notice don't act holy. They might not act holy because they don't know they're holy. They don't know what you know, and in that lives all the world's sorrow. I think. 

So go out in nature and give an offering of gratitude and imagine your relative created all that you see, including you.  All that you see, all creation, creation made from love is holy. So, I will try to walk with this truth, and I hope you do too. Thank you so much for tuning in again. Please consider sharing and subscribing to these episodes. Next week we'll be covering Psalm 87. So, I'll see you then. Bye bye.