Weekly thoughts from the Rector of Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas, where these words remind us that Jesus’ peace goes with us into the world.

The Book of Psalms is the Prayer Book of the Bible. It covers the whole range of our human experience and emotions from praise and happiness and thanksgiving to anguish and despair and rage, which is sometimes directly toward other people and, yes, sometimes directed toward God. The psalms give us permission to be honest in our conversations with God, even if what we have to say is completely embarrassing or misinformed or hateful. Of course, the notion that we’ll be vindicated because nothing can be hidden from God usually omits the fact that the same applies to our own lives. Psalm 139, which is part of our liturgy today, acknowledges that God has examined us in the past and invites God, boldly, to examine us in the present:

Search me out, O God, and know my heart; *
try me and know my restless thoughts.

Look well whether there be any wickedness in me *
and lead me in the way that is everlasting.

Those words bring to mind one of my favorite prayers in the Anglican tradition. It comes at the beginning of our worship and is called the Collect for Purity. That name, however, can be more than a little misleading. The clean slate, so to speak, that it implies isn’t something that we bring to the Table on our own, as though we have no need for God. Rather, it’s the result of God’s mercy and graciousness toward us in spite of ourselves, in spite of what is unspoken and gripped tightly inside us:

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

— The Rev. Neil Alan Willard, Rector