Canter Bridge

The biblical psalms are intensely realistic, particularly those that are born in a bed of conflict.

No pious evasiveness, no pollyanish denial shows its face in this genre of the biblical anthology. One counts the enemy with subdued precision, missing not a one. Indeed the third psalm, a point in the psalter when things are only just finding their stride, begins with just such a declaration:

O LORD, how many are my foes!
Many are rising against me. (Psalm 3.1 ESV)

The perduring value of such psalms rests in the fact that for centuries readers have come to these odd declarations of angst and praise from quite diverse circumstances. We each number our own adversaries and then find in the biblical psalms the kindred fellowship of those who have done the same sums.

If this describes their appeal, the potency of such psalms is a derivative of the hard-won confidence in YHWH that emerges in the furnace of affliction. No pop-psychological optimism explains these poems, no cheap entitlement to life, love, and the pursuit of happiness, no pastel expectation that things turn out all right in the end. Instead, a chastened, burning, eyes-wide-open confidence in YHWH’s active, empowering presence flavors every layer of the literary fabric.

How many are my adversaries, oh Lord!

Such is the declaration of life’s realia.

But you, O LORD, are a shield around me,
my glory, and the one who lifts up my head.

Here lies the counterpoise to all that devours, here the power of psalms read out by voices that tremble, weep, and go silent against the leaden wall of trauma declared for what it is.

Here the declaration that raises the dead and countermands the decrees of invasive Sheol. Here the life that knows death is beaten someday and even now.