Sunday Morning Meds--Be Exalted!

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; 

let your glory be over all the earth. Psalm 57:11

Took my breath away. Honestly, it did. Forty years ago, I was on the very edge of what Canadians call “the bush,” in an old 1930s farm home in northern Ontario with twenty-some people, fifteen or so members of one family, all of them smiling. I was an honored guest, the youth retreat speaker, but so were a half-dozen others, kids on retreat. When Dad prayed that first morning at breakfast, I felt the blessing.

One afternoon Dad and his boys butchered a cow. I walked out back to watch. When one of the boys got on the tractor and scooped up the entrails, I asked another one where he was toting blood and guts. “We’ll dump it out back,” he said. I shook my head in the loud sputtering of that tractor. “The bears’ll get it,” he yelled over the popping.

A wilderness family of 17 people so full of love and spirit that I wished the world could take a seat at that long kitchen table and get their own breakfast scoop of porridge. Faith breathed in that house and beamed out there in the bush; and, young writer that I was, I knew, maybe for the first time in my life, that I had to commit what I saw and felt to words.

Some years ago now, 25 years and a half-dozen visits to the place later, I returned from that wilderness family’s mother’s funeral. Her husband had died just a few months before.

It’s a long ride up to the bush, and we got there just before ten at night, the wake just about over. They’d kept the coffin open for us, they said, because they knew we were coming. And there she was, Mom to 15 kids and 50+ grandchildren, most of them there in the church. Her mortal shell was there, but she was gone, somewhere smiling.

Her sons had built the gorgeous coffin, and once we backed away the six of them together closed the lid. I’ve seen wreaths laid at Arlington’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but those six strong men bringing the cover down over their mom’s remains, a cover they’d made with their own hands, was a beloved gesture I’ll never forget.

Honestly, I’m not sure what David means when he asks the Lord to exalt himself. It’s as if he’s trying to coax some jittery kid out on the stage for a show that’s been rehearsed for weeks. I’m still not sure God almighty needs a cheerleader. “Be exalted, Lord,” he says, as if the Creator of Heaven and Earth is somehow introverted.

But this morning I’m thinking that the glory of the Lord is not just a perfect dawn or some stupendous miracle that leaves us speechless. The God I know is exalted in the lives of his saints, each of them, and in their going home, all that devoted joy behind.

Once upon a time I attended the funeral of a deeply pious woman, mother of 15, who, long ago, with her husband, made me want to sing in a house on the edge of the bush, with bears for neighbors. Late at night, in the wilderness again, I saw, for the last time, a woman on whom God’s glory shown like some sparkling patina.

I don’t think David had a funeral in mind when he ended this wholehearted psalm of praise with the words he did, but I believe he’d be singing himself at the blessed eternity of the lives of the saints, one more of whom went home back then.

In her annual joy at first robins and early daffodils, in her unceasing prayers for her children, in her lifelong trust in the Lord, that woman, a cheerleader in the God’s glorious wilderness, praised the Lord. God almighty was and is exalted.