Canter Bridge

** a wedding gift for J.R. and Molly Friesen, married yesterday in Billings, Montana, USA

The rhythm of life with YHWH includes periods of silence and still others when the only audible sound is a groan. It is the good fortune of those whom YHWH accompanies that this unmelodious moment is, if not short-lived, then at least bound to its season. Despair’s silence and pain’s sigh are conceded their space on the enigmatic score, yet they are not intended to dominate the course from one movement to another nor to usurp the final one.

Rather, the biblical poets alert us to the ambitious, spontaneous eruption of a new song. The thrusting forth of this dance-able melody comes often when least expected and casts all subdominant grief in a new harmonic frame. What a moment ago sounded forth with tyrannical self-confidence is understood now to have been a foil, a prelude, the musical antechamber to ejaculative joy of the kind that no prior musical experience has quite prepared one to encounter. (more…)

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* Dedicated to my friend Rev. Robert Eyman, Spokane, Washington, USA

One of the finest of the so-called ‘Hallelujah Psalms’, the one hundred forty-seventh speaks an encouraging word to the broken-hearted among us. The poet angles in on the appropriateness of praise, recognizing that a universe governed in the way this one is ruled has become a venue where gratitude is the fitting response.

How good it is to sing praises to our God;
for he is gracious, and a song of praise is fitting. (Psalm 147:1 NRSV)

One does not arrive at such a response unreflectively. From every corner evidence presents itself that might well seem to render praise anything but the proper sound in a broken world where blood flows too freely and sorrow gathers in silent, menacing clumps. Yet the psalmist has fought his way to a hermeneutical angle from which his gaze takes in reasons for gratitude rather than resentment. He is convinced his angle is the proper one, not a cheap analgesic, no psychological trick crafted merely to dull the pain. (more…)

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If Paul Simon could find only fifty ways to leave his lover, the writer of Psalm 119 clearly trumps him. Verse after verse of this acrostic poem—meaning that the first letter of each line follows the alphabet in a clearly identifiable pattern—lauds YHWH’s word, law, and promise with language usually reserved for romance.

I rejoice at your word like one who finds great spoil. (Psalm 119:162 NRSV)

Although specific lines from this resolutely focused psalm have found their way into Jewish and Christian spirituality, the psalm itself strikes many modern readers as tedious and—dare one say it—a bit obsessive. A poem like this places a premium on form and then works its content to fit. Even a sympathetic reader is likely to conclude when watching the writer reach for say, a fifth line that begins with the letter ‘ayin’, that the dude should give himself a break. (more…)

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It would be a mistake to read into the Psalm’s rhetoric of the soul—in Hebrew, the נפשׁ (nefesh)—Greek conceptions of an invisible, enduring segment of the human creature. That is not in view, not least when the psalmist gives commands to his soul: ‘Praise the Lord, o my soul!’, ‘Awake, my soul!’, and the like. (more…)

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