Canter Bridge

Something there is in YHWH’s justice that sets propriety to one side and makes grown men shout as though mad.

When a person or a community has ached for justice to be done, become familiar with the sour bile of longing, wondered times beyond counting whether it is vain to wait any longer when nobody seems to care, then correct decorum hardly matters. When YHWH (finally!) bares his arm to humiliate the arrogant and lift up the humble, the turning of tables is not met with quietly mumbled liturgies and neatly pressed shirts.

To the contrary, clothing becomes drenched with sweat as praise erupts from the lungs and legs of women and men who never thought they’d live to see the moment.

Even the familiar cadence of the traditional ‘make a joyful noise’ stumbles at catching the raw, throaty shouting of it all. Igor Stravinsky’s musical palette, perhaps, comes closest to capturing the cacophonous beauty of praise that erupts, of shouts, of songs that break forth, of seas that roar so loudly and unpredictably that all that is known and stable shakes dangerously at their unleashed, joyful fury:

Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth;
break forth into joyous song and sing praises.
Sing praises to the LORD with the lyre,
with the lyre and the sound of melody.
With trumpets and the sound of the horn
make a joyful noise before the King, the LORD.

Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
the world and those who live in it.
Let the floods clap their hands;
let the hills sing together for joy
at the presence of the LORD, for he is coming
to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with equity. (Psalm 98:4-9)

People who have felt their center of gravity tilting deathfully into the chasm, those whose necks have snapped back as their nostrils—unwanting—breathed in the stench of death, such people have not time for the measured cadences of the safe and holy.

The earth and sea become their ally, at least in the psalmist’s poetry and the heart’s longing as they shout. Dance. Leap. Roar.

YHWH is not, after all, asleep. The sum of our fears, it turns out, was a colossal miscount. Quiet prayers will wait. Shout!