Daily Lesson for March 9, 2017

Today's daily lesson comes from Deuteronomy chapter 10 verses 1 and 2:

“At that time the Lord said to me, ‘Cut for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and come up to me on the mountain and mmake an ark of wood. 2 And I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets that you broke, and you shall put them in the ark.’

There is an old Jewish midrashic tradition that says as the Israelites traveled through the wilderness, they carried with them in the ark of the covenant two sets of tablets of the Ten Commandments.  The first set was carved and etched by God, yet broken by Moses in the face of the Israelites' idolatry with the Golden Calf. The second set was that which God instructed Moses to carve out of the mountain rock himself.

The spiritual meaning of this old midrash tells us that we each have two tablets within us. The first set is pure gift, carved and etched by God -- yet broken by our own selfish rebellion.  We keep its broken pieces as a reminder of what was once pure and undefiled, but now shattered in each of our lives. The second set did not come so easily, it took work -- hard, painstaking work on our part.  This set too is just as fragile as the first set, so we lay them together -- one to remind us of the precious fragility of the other. We treasure both; for we know that without the broken we would not have the whole.  One was first, the other was second, but they are both present; and we carry both into our future.

"First the fall, and then the redemption," Julian of Norwich said, "and both are the grace of God."

May we learn to treasure both the fall and the redemption, the broken and the whole, in the ark of our own souls.