Canter Bridge

Order is not a given. It is rather an achievement.

Revolutions fail because they do not understand that the removal of an oppressive status quo does not by itself achieve a more agreeable order. Chaos too often ensues.

Chaos is the Boogie Man behind the biblical literature’s hopes and fears, as it is in many cultures up to and including those that fill up the earth in our generation. The idealism that considers reversion to a primitive or natural state of existence as a good thing blinds us to the specter of chaos that everywhere lurks in the quiet terrors of people who have not been shielded from its violence by decades of peaceful order achieved at great cost.

If it is hard to imagine this aspect of the world’s architecture, it is because privilege has softened us. We no longer understand what chaos is. We fail to fear it adequately.

The forty-sixth psalm is explicit about the fact of chaos. Yet, the psalmist’s heart finds rest in his counterintuitive trust that he has achieved in YHWH as the bulwark against chaos’ raging.

Against the tumult of mountains thrown about and waters roaring out their ability to drown, to annihilate, to wash away, the writer finds in YHWH an ever present help. Indeed, he envisages YHWH not only taming the waters’ roar into some passive non-threat. He takes yet another conceptual step and asks his readers to consider those waters turned into a peaceful river that nourishes rather than devastates the community of YHWH’s trusting daughters and sons.

We will not fear … (Psalm 46:2 NRSV)

It is one of the ludicrous confessions that pepper the Bible’s pages. It is nonsense in the light of a chaotic world of unstable mountains and careening nations that give one every reason to shake in horror. Nonsense, that is, unless the underlying conviction that YHWH somehow manages, restrains, and even sustains these disordering forces actually better represents reality than any alternative theory.

In the placid West—again, not a place of natural calm but of one achieved at great cost—we seldom reckon with that chaos that takes life as cheaply as consumer goods swept from a shop’s shelves by an errant wild-man. We are not bereft, however, of the opportunity to glimpse the ugly power of chaos. We know a chaos of the mind so threatening that it’s best not to dwell on it, lest the latent power we sense take over our minds and turn us, too, into madmen.

Chaos, it turns out, is not so distant from us.

The psalmist invites his reader once more to reckon with this enduring threat, to take measure of its scope and scale, to feel his utter smallness before its raging, to confess his naked vulnerability to its nihilistic potency.

Then, to trust.

To say ludicrous words made sane only if the theory of reality they represent is somehow, irrepressibly authentic.

We will not fear.

Though the earth give way. Though mountains fall into the sea.