Canter Bridge

It is remarkable to find so much joy in the literature of lament and need.

A recurring feature of the Psalms’ prayers is the happiness of the lowly who have seen YHWH act. ‘You have turned my sorrow into dancing, ashes into a garment of praise’ is one explicit poetic recognition of a theme that runs deep and quiet elsewhere. Those who have no hope outside of YHWH, no recourse but the movement of heaven, are the most natural participants in that explosive joy that flows when YHWH is seen to act.

Psalm 68 recounts one man’s life in the shadow of a formidable adversary. Psalm 69 narrates the shame that is the dry crust of the righteous who suffer at the hands of oppressors nearer to hand. Both poems—longer than most and more repetitive in their delineation of what it is like to be cornered by circumstance and enmity—draw out what penury means. What defenselessness feels like in one’s bones. What calumny does to flesh and spirit. Words like these glow like hot coals when a reader who has known such dark corners of human experience happens upon them.

Both psalms fairly burst with small, dense celebrations of joy.

Psalm 68 urges reality to shape itself in this way:

Let God rise up, let his enemies be scattered;
let those who hate him flee before him.
As smoke is driven away, so drive them away;
as wax melts before the fire,
let the wicked perish before God.
But let the righteous be joyful;
let them exult before God;
let them be jubilant with joy. (Psalm 68:1-3 NRSV)

The prayers of righteous sufferers are not squeamish about counterposing the joy of YHWH’s little ones to the desolation of the wicked, for moments like in moments like theirs they are not too concerned about what the more sensitive neighbors might think.

The following psalm, the sixty-ninth, is even more poignant in painting suffering’s portrait as a watery death. Yet God does nothing:

Save me, O God,
for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire,
where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters,
and the flood sweeps over me.
I am weary with my crying;
my throat is parched.
My eyes grow dim
with waiting for my God. (Psalm 69:1-3 NRSV)

Calumny—words distilled into venom—is their weapon:

You know the insults I receive,
and my shame and dishonor;
my foes are all known to you.
Insults have broken my heart,
so that I am in despair.
I looked for pity, but there was none;
and for comforters, but I found none.
They gave me poison for food,
and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.

Yet even in this crucible of shame, where vindication seems to have been not merely postponed but canceled outright, hope is expressible in the language of the joy of the lowly:

I will praise the name of God with a song;
I will magnify him with thanksgiving.
This will please the LORD more than an ox
or a bull with horns and hoofs.
Let the oppressed see it and be glad;
you who seek God, let your hearts revive.
For the LORD hears the needy,
and does not despise his own that are in bonds.

The joy of the lowly would often greet the Galilean prophet whose words so often alluded to this motif, usually in the Hebraic verse of his people’s sacred writings.

Others may despise those who languish in bonds of words and steel. The Lord, the psalmist instructs us, does not.

Joy breaks in unison before a dawn like that.