Canter Bridge

Ascribed to David, this psalm fits well into the historicizing tendency evident already in early biblical manuscripts to link each psalm to a moment in the life of the Israelite king. David’s flight into the Judean desert before the insurrection of Absalom, for example, would accord well with the psalm’s cryptic reference to ‘David, when he was in the desert of Judah’.

Yet one wonders whether the enduring power and pertinence of psalms like this one lie in their power to latch themselves onto the circumstances of our lives rather than to cling to the details of his. Whether the psalm’s memorable ‘dry and thirsty land where there is no water’ was for the writer a physical or a metaphorical location, it continues serving as the latter for us. I can walk over, open the tap, and find virtually no end to the flow of pure liquid. But right here, in this chair, on this morning, I can feel far more deeply than that liquid abundance the leering, bone-dry desert that threatens joy and meaning themselves.

So the psalms not only survive, but live, thrive, nourish, and even from time to time command into reshaped form the contours of our lives.

The sixty-third is particularly capable in this regard:

O God, you are my God, I seek you,
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. (Psalm 63:1 NRSV)

Though the poet does not end in anguish, he does not fail to begin there. He can recall ‘seeing’ YHWH in the temple, indeed he finds that memory to be a hope as well, one that sustains him where there is only brush and drought.

Yet with detailed poignance he describes his present moment, his undeniable location where his soul thirsts and his flesh faints and he finds no water with which to bring them back to alert satisfaction.

It is not, the psalm’s and the psalter’s wider perspective would have us know, the place of our destination. Yet is it most certainly and upon occasion the land through which we must pass and in which we must for some considerable stretch of days, months, or years languish in waterless longing.

To imagine otherwise is to circumvent the testimony of biblical realism and to erect an idolatrous faith that knows only how to proclaim an incessant song of self-satisfaction. That tune is a lie, a seductive, mesmerizing fiction.

Reality lies out here in this desert, with its longing, its fainting, its parched tongue that—somehow and against both odds and evidence—remembers how to articulate praise in the dialect of pleading.