Canter Bridge

It may be that only those who know their weakness can profit from a discourse on strength. It is plausible that only those who have stumbled badly, wilted under an unwavering sun, exhausted all illusion of self-empowerment can embrace the notion of divine sovereignty over their wretched, torn lives.

It may be that prophetic literature like the fortieth chapter of Isaiah reckons more clearly with such a paradox than ten thousand trucks full of self-help literature, enslaved as the latter is to the notion that we are capable meaningfully of rising up from the ditches into which life shoves us, with our consent or without it.

The soaring, lyric quality of this famous poetry brings to bear the notion of an untiring, unhindered God whose majesty is ineffably evident to those who will consider its possibility, yet oddly remote—even invisible—to those who will not. Modern moral aesthetics very quickly conclude that those writers, ancient or modern, who place literature in the service of such apothesosis have prostituted themselves and demeaned their craft. The genre seems mere bluster, the self-proclaimed superiority of a deity in a manner that necessarily demeans and often humiliates those human beings who struggle nobly to live lives of dignity and meaning on their own terms.

The reader who has developed her capacity to read an alien literature with sympathy may render a different verdict when faced with the undeniable splendor of a biblical passage like this one. She may find it oddly elevating as well as worthy of her artistic respect. She may discover in the deity portrayed here a welcome ally in the struggle to make sense of a life that lurches too frequently into dead ends and dangerous alleys. She may find renewal of strength, odd as that sounds to ears accustomed to hear faith’s glorification of its God as the sinister enabler of a life addicted to powerlessness and misery.

One hears in this poetic narrative of Judah’s renascence the profound relativization of all powers that would fix her to the slavery either of malevolent powers or of low expectation:

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
and spreads them like a tent to live in;
who brings princes to naught,
and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.

Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows upon them, and they wither,
and the tempest carries them off like stubble.

One might feel threatened by such a deconstruction of human achievement and its consequent power.

Yet the force of the argument is directed only against those who enslave, not those who are bound. We read within this conceptual orbit that this YHWH, loud as his protestations of unstoppability ring, is also the kind who ‘feeds his flock like a shepherd, gathers the lambs in his arms, carries them in his bosom, and gently leads the mother sheep.’

Patronizing? The subterfuge of this YHWH’s clerical mediators, intent on feathering their nests with the accoutrements of service?

Not likely. Rather the text is pervaded by the very empowerment that undermines all professional claims to exclusive advocacy, to the perennial perks of religious service, to that familiar containment of a deity’s authority within the greedy confines of the guild that represents him.

Why do you say, O Jacob,
and speak, O Israel,
‘My way is hidden from the LORD,
and my right is disregarded by my God’?
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.

If even one-tenth of such artistry accurately represents the God who owes no debt that is payable only in the corridors of human power, then the poor in spirit—as Jerusalem’s heirs would one day hear in the accented paradoxes of a Galilean prophet—are blessed indeed.