Canter Bridge

The thirty-second psalm is all but drunk with sweet release.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the LORD counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. (Psalm 32:1–2 ESV)

Like most durable truths, this one has been hard won. Whatever the shattering failure of the writer, it led to writhing that seemed a sickness unto death:

For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah

I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

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We loathe the moment when our conversation partner looks distractedly over our shoulder. Or fidgets with his keys. Or gives the appearance of listening, but with her eyes empty as clouds, her thoughts elsewhere.

We long for eye contact. We were made for face-to-face. (more…)

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Convinced of his integrity, the writer of Psalm 26 pleads for vindication with a confidence that tender souls might find disturbing.

We must understand that the writer has done precisely what the ‘wisdom psalms’ instruct the novice in life to do if he wants to become both just and wise. The psalmist can speak transparently about his trajectory in life because he has followed the game plan. It is not that he has beat out his neighbors in some cheap contest of personal rectitude. Rather, YHWH’s plan for the development of a human life has proved reliable. Except, so far, for the part about vindication. (more…)

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What was I thinking …?

We ask ourself the impossible question when our idiocy has come under the irrefutable light of day.

I was a fool. I was deluded. Distracted. Or drunk. Or stupid.

It is every believer’s nightmare, to have been wrong about everything. Regardless of the ideology that has claimed heart,  mind, or wallet—faithfully secular or conventionally religious—the wolf at the door is to have been simply wrong. Because faith goes to the root of things, to be proven wrong about our core conviction is to have been wrong about everything else as well. (more…)

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Out of sight, out of mind.

So do we forget people we ought always to remember. So do we lose contact. ‘We aren’t really in touch’, people say, the absence of communication speaking volumes.

That’s the thing about distance. It’s not so much the matter of being across the river or the next town over or a time zone away. It’s that there’s no seeing. No hearing.

‘I can’t be reached’, we say. Terrible things might happen and the one who could have done something finds out when it’s already too late. Just by being far away. (more…)

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In the Psalms, as in life, the enemy is often hidden and relentlessly scheming. Here as in so many other of its observations, the book of Psalms displays its characteristic realism.

We are more sentimental and romantic about our adversaries, at least in those moments when we can bring ourselves to admit their existence. We do alright with evil, comfortably abstract and remote. But we resist the notion of evil people. They’re a bit too concrete for our post-modern aesthetic, where everyone gads about on pretty much the same moral plain and almost any action can be tolerated if we can just find an angle from which to understand its causes. (more…)

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In ancient Israel as in our day, it sometimes seemed that true religion required the infrastructure of holiness and piety’s ever-grasping bureaucracy. Absent temple, priesthood, and sacrifice, what is one really to do?

The voice of the psalmists brings in prayer—wherever life’s inconvenience locates the one who speaks to God in this naked, untrammeled way—as the good-enough engagement with YHWH when it is all one has at hand.

O LORD, I call upon you; hasten to me!
Give ear to my voice when I call to you!
Let my prayer be counted as incense before you,
and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice! (Psalm 141:1–2 ESV) (more…)

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The altitudes of the heart are of massive importance to the biblical witness.

Particularly in the book of Isaiah, the hubris that leads a human being to elevate himself is a certain prescription that he will be brought low. The Psalms also pick up this topic, with uncanny employment of the same vocabulary that Isaiah uses to make the point.

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. (Psalm 131:1–2 ESV) (more…)

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