I need admit that I do not usually pay a lot of attention to the Psalm which is offered as part of our Liturgy of the Word each Sunday; however, a line from this Sunday’s Psalm (Ps 95) caught my attention.
The line reads, “harden not your hearts as at Meribah, as on that day at Massah, in the desert.”
From the recesses of my memory bank there awakened a saying attributed to St. Irenaeus.
Irenaeus was born during the first half of the 2nd century, somewhere between the years 120 and 140.
The prayer reads as follows:
It is not you that shapes God; it is God that shapes you.
If then you are the work of God await the hand of the artist who does all things in due season.
Offer him your heart, soft and tractable, and keep the form in which the artist has fashioned you.
Let your clay be moist, lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of his fingers.