Hosea 9:4 · World English Bible
They won’t pour out wine offerings to Yahweh, neither will they be pleasing to him. Their sacrifices will be to them like the bread of mourners; all who eat of it will be polluted; for their bread will be for their appetite. It will not come into Yahweh’s house.
An offering made from a corrupted state does not rise. The wine poured out no longer pleases, the sacrifice tastes like the bread eaten in a house of mourning, and everyone who touches it is defiled rather than lifted.
From the Clinical Psychology reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
An offering made from a corrupted state does not rise. The wine poured out no longer pleases, the sacrifice tastes like the bread eaten in a house of mourning, and everyone who touches it is defiled rather than lifted. The form is intact and the substance is dead, because the one who brings it has already turned away inside.
Ritual cannot carry upward what the heart has hollowed out beneath it. A man can perform every motion of devotion and connect to nothing, feeding only himself in the shape of feeding God. The rite goes nowhere. The offering was meant to enter the house and orient him toward the highest thing, and instead it stays with him, spoiling. Go through the sacred gestures while rotten within, and they nourish the rot.
Clinical Psychology lens
Which of your good habits has become an empty gesture?
A gift given for show, grudgingly or for return, is of the lowest kind. The outward act is identical. What it carries is not.
Let your deeds be for their own sake. An action done to be seen has already collected its payment and has nothing left to give.
Incense burned with a distracted mind is only smoke. The posture of practice without the mind in it is furniture.
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Clinical Psychology