Canter Bridge

Twice in this short prayer the psalmist urges God to move more quickly. He knows his own extinction will be the price of divine nonchalance:

Be pleased, O God, to deliver me.
O LORD, make haste to help me! (Psalm 70:1 NRSV)

And again:

But I am poor and needy;
hasten to me, O God!
You are my help and my deliverer;
O LORD, do not delay!

While he waits for God to show a proper sense of urgency, the pray-er divides humankind into that simple dualism which impresses itself upon the harassed mind as the truest description of his neighbors. Exquisitely, both parties are on a quest. One seeks the psalmist’s life. The other pursues God.

Artistry here captures in brief what in another genre fills tomes of sociology and psychology, as it should. The psalmist, faced with his demise, has little time for the details in which a more leisurely science indulges. As he’s been pushed closer to the cliff, an urgent reductionism has become his philosophy. Continue Reading »

The sixty-eighty Psalm refers to a marching deity with an archaic expression that might be translated as titular: ‘He of Sinai’.

Israel’s faith does not begin with abstractions nor with generalizations about a cosmic deity and his unchanging rules. Rather, faith in YHWH begins for Israel with memory of an upending liberation from the invincible power that was Egypt, her captor. In time, Israel’s faith will generate exquisite statements about creation and its solidity, about the timeless structures of reality under YHWH’s rule, about the wisdom that is required to inhabit such a place. Continue Reading »

Biblical spirituality comprehends that extreme crisis of body and soul in which a human being finds himself terrified, anguished, and undone in the presence of YHWH. At times the soul’s calamity experiences YHWH’s accusing silence as his only, unholy communication:

O LORD, do not rebuke me in your anger,
or discipline me in your wrath.
Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am languishing;
O LORD, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror.
My soul also is struck with terror,
while you, O LORD—how long? (Psalm 6:1-3 NRSV)

Bold, fear-challenging vigor comes to us in such prayers. They provide words for that moment when few seem capable of taking up the angst that seems sufficient to kill us but chooses instead the less bearable determination to prolong our suffering while the heavens remain silent. Continue Reading »

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)

Continue Reading »