Canter Bridge

Occasionally a psalm, as though on a sunny afternoon with a glass of Merlot in hand and feet up, allows itself to savor the comprehensive provision of YHWH. Such is not a moment for fretting. There will be time enough for that.

The poet simply allows himself a lyrical sigh of contentment.

Psalm 65, in that vein of relaxed contemplation, casts its eye over the wide, satisfying goodness into which YHWH has brought his people.

There is the joy, first among equals in this poem, of YHWH’s presence in his house. From that shelter flow all species of blessing.

Praise is due to you,
O God, in Zion;
and to you shall vows be performed,
O you who answer prayer!
To you all flesh shall come.
When deeds of iniquity overwhelm us,
you forgive our transgressions.
Happy are those whom you choose and bring near
to live in your courts.
We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house,
your holy temple. (Psalm 64:1-4 NRSV)

This is not the reluctant, disciplined, muscular praise of the man or woman in crisis who might just as well curse God and die. It is rather the steadily patterned, week-on-week delight of a community that knows where to experience praise, where one more time to discover forgiveness when life has lurched off its rails, where to revel in their dangerous but essential identity as YHWH’s chosen.

There is a temple in this poet’s city. He has often gone there with his fellows, knows its light and its shadows, exults quite naturally in the existential handsomeness of its architecture and the presence of its divine landlord.

The psalmist recalls as well YHWH’s rescuing intervention in less settled times.

The language of awesome deeds, of roaring seas, of mountains established in strength is not the dialect of a lazy Sabbath afternoon, at least not in its origin if perchance in its recitation.

By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance,
O God of our salvation;
you are the hope of all the ends of the earth
and of the farthest seas.
By your strength you established the mountains;
you are girded with might.
You silence the roaring of the seas,
the roaring of their waves,
the tumult of the peoples.
Those who live at earth’s farthest bounds are awed by your signs;
you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy.

The people that speaks this way is cognizant of extermination, familiar enough with the stomp of jackboots in the street, aware enough that this day of light and song might have known instead ashes and screams. Lethal threat may be, just now, a memory. But one’s grandparents still go white at certain repeated sounds, mother has warned that we don’t speak of that thing, children know by intuition what they cannot yet articulate: Had YHWH not bared his arm, those people would have stomped on our graves, laughed at our songs, wiped our father’s names from the stories of men. That such things can be noted in a song that celebrates their unreality is testimony to the appropriateness of YHWH’s praise in Zion.

You visit the earth and water it,
you greatly enrich it;
the river of God is full of water;
you provide the people with grain,
for so you have prepared it.
You water its furrows abundantly,
settling its ridges,
softening it with showers,
and blessing its growth.
You crown the year with your bounty;
your wagon tracks overflow with richness.
The pastures of the wilderness overflow,
the hills gird themselves with joy,
the meadows clothe themselves with flocks,
the valleys deck themselves with grain,
they shout and sing together for joy.

This fine land, too, merits a song, not because its fertility, its gentle ridges, its sheep spread across the hills like braids on a women’s head bring any guarantee. Indeed they do not.

Yet YHWH has been good again this year, bringing to our soil the taste of pomegranate, the bleating of lambs, the aromatic satisfaction that blesses the seasonal rains, and a sun that shines in its expected season.

Drought, warfare, intracommunal conflict, the infant who seizes up and breathes no more, these things are not erased by a song of contentment like this one. Yet they recede in a moment of easy contemplation, of the recall that it’s been some time now since we wept without hope, before the expectation that God—for reasons best known only to him—walks with us in this season.