A young man comes close to swooning at unity’s bliss. It seems a euphoric thing, an unvariegated meeting of minds, the centering of disparate lives around a perfect truth. It is an idea with which he can fall in love, an intoxicating perfection, an abstraction that seems to him worth the whole world.
Old men do not allow themselves such delusions. They know that unity is neither simple nor easy. It compensates for these apparent deficiencies by its surplus of beauty.
How very good and pleasant it is
when kindred live together in unity!
It is like the precious oil on the head,
running down upon the beard,
on the beard of Aaron,
running down over the collar of his robes.
It is like the dew of Hermon,
which falls on the mountains of Zion.
For there the LORD ordained his blessing,
life forevermore. (Psalm 133:1-3 NRSV)
Unity worthy of one of antiquity’s finer poems is hard-won and multi-layered. It does not insist that everyone agree on all things, only that hearts be joined in open-eyed covenant. It finds its cool refreshment not in the absence of disagreement but rather in its penultimacy. Brothers look each other in the eye, choose not to deny the other’s prickly individuality, then covenant to be there for and with the brother regardless of his obstinate refusal to see things as one does.
This is Hermon’s dew, Aaron’s anointing, Zion’s breeze.
Such is the complex, warrior-worthy unity of brothers who dwell together in spite of so much.
Astonishingly, for this writer of Psalms, unity like this is no mere human moment, satisfying though that might be. It is rather the fertile matrix into which YHWH deposits his blessing, even life forevermore.
Canter Bridge 
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