From the August 4 entry, I found the Psalm with the lines and idea I wanted. I tried to edit it into that entry, but even though I poked “edit,” I could not get the document to let me in. If it weren’t so late, I would peruse the instructions for using the new format [so many symbols], but it is late. And yet, here are the lines from Psalm 139:
1 O Lord, you search me and you know me.
2 You yourself know my resting and my rising;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
On the one hand, being known this intimately by the God who created this immense universe with its myriad galaxies as we understand it today through the astronomers is a fairly terrifying thing, especially considering how inane and utterly trivial most of my thoughts are. If, however, we take the Bible seriously as the word of God, then, on the other hand, there can be something comforting in the idea as well, especially if love stands at the heart of the relationship and the knowledge.
The lines from the Psalm that I was referring to on 8/4 were these:
13 For it was you who formed my inmost being,
knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I thank you who wonderfully made me;
how wonderful are your works,
which my soul knows well!
15 My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being fashioned in secret
and molded in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw me yet unformed;
and all days are recorded in your book,
formed before one of them came into being.
from The Revised GRAIL PSALMS: a liturgical psalter. (2010)
There, it seems to me, is the heart of the idea that our identities are shrouded in mystery: I/we are specially and deliberately created and know as such by the creator. On the side of terror, we all, I reckon are nowhere near what we ought to be. On that thought, I will quit for the moment and go to bed, being certain to say my prayers, and to give my little dog Schuster his final belly rub of the day, for he too, was deliberately and specially made.
