Canter Bridge

We blanch at the clarity of suffering.

If we have not experienced direct attack on our lives, our livelihoods, our family, or our faith, the slashing verbal knives of those who lament seem uncivilized, unsafe, and awkward. When we read, we skip over such language, whether our audience be our children, our congregation, or ourselves.

Truth be told, the clarity of the besieged is not a perspicuity that works well in all contexts. We understand that reality and human hearts are too complex and nuanced to fit into a good guys/bad guys bifurcation of our race. Wasn’t it a voice as suppressed as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s that taught us where the line between good and evil lies?: not between peoples or even people but through the heart of every human being.

Yet we must not quiet the voice of the martyrs or the cries of those who find themselves vulnerable to a painful and unjust end. Even if self-interest is the highest motive we can muster, one must remember this: I may one day need these words.

For there is no truth in their mouths; their hearts are destruction;
|their throats are open graves; they flatter with their tongues.
Make them bear their guilt, O God; let them fall by their own counsels;
because of their many transgressions cast them out, for they have rebelled against you. (Psalm 5:9–10 NRSV)

The poet has known enough of suffering to place a pungent prayer on the lips of those who have lost all recourse except YHWH himself.

The fifth psalm, as so many of its peers, cries out for ruin to be the fate of those who pound its author’s life into the ground. For the duration of his lucid moment, the pray-er knows his persecutors to be rebelling against God himself. He knows what ought to, what must, what—please, God, do it!—cannot but fall upon the heads of such assassins, whose fingers are stained with my life’s blood.

At the same time, the faithful lose their limp, their homely frailty, their vulnerable lips so capable of hypocrisy, their hearts so wandering, the seed of evil that germinates in their soul and but for YHWH’s providence and a long accrual of small, righteous decisions should place them quickly on the other side of life. Of this prayer.

But let all who take refuge in you rejoice;
let them ever sing for joy.
Spread your protection over them,
so that those who love your name may exult in you.
For you bless the righteous, O LORD;
you cover them with favor as with a shield. (Psalm 5:11–12 NRSV)

The definition of this fortunate population is the definition of the sufferer himself. Like him, they take refuge in you.

In desperation, they are family. The clarity of the suffering not only profiles with uncommon sharpness the silhouette of one’s enemy. It also labels this one ‘brother’, that one ‘sister’, this child ‘m’ijo’, this aged lady ‘abuelita’.

The psalmist wishes for his kin not only the protection that is obviously needful. He wants more.

He wants laughter. Deep, joyous, exultant, belly-rocking laughter.

In the clarity of unjust affliction, one prays with no footnotes: Make these ones wander alone like living dead. Make these, in safe and tear-stained embrace, laugh until they can hardly remember why.

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Full of summons to praise YHWH, the biblical psalms always provide a reason for doing so. In English translation, the word ‘for’ or ‘because’—commonly rendering Hebrew כי—habitually serves at the hinge between the command to praise YHWH and a motive clause that grounds such a response in YHWH’s deeds or his character.

Empty praise, that is to say praise for the sake of praise, is virtually unknown in the Psalter. When Christian worshipers hear it from worship platforms and worship leaders, they can be sure that liturgy has become detached from the biblical logic and rhythm of praise.

The psalter’s next-to-last exemplar piles up words in order to articulate the joyful nature of the people’s praise. No mere contemplative bliss, the vigor of their worship is to be expressed via dance and instrumental music.

The reason for such animated worship is, via a kind of logical rhyme, YHWH’s own delight in his people.

Praise the LORD!
Sing to the LORD a new song,
his praise in the assembly of the faithful.
Let Israel be glad in its Maker;
let the children of Zion rejoice in their King.
Let them praise his name with dancing,
making melody to him with tambourine and lyre.
For the LORD takes pleasure in his people;
he adorns the humble with victory. (Psalm 149:1–4 NRSV)

Delight, or taking pleasure, is a notion that occurs frequently in the biblical prophets, as in the Bible’s wisdom literature. One delights in YHWH and in that expression of his heart that is known as Torah or Instruction.

With winsome gratitude, notwithstanding his imperatival mode of expression, the psalmist places on display the reciprocal nature of such delight. We see YHWH smiling broadly as he contemplates his own daughters and sons. What is more, he beautifies—the New Revised Standard Version‘s ‘adorns’ is a nice flourish—his humble ones with victory.

The once tattered stroll about in designer threads, a reflected smile lighting their lifted faces.

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Words matter. Sometimes they wound. At points they murder.

The Bible treats the power of words with remarkable care. It knows they can give life, or take it.

With stark parallelism, the one-hundred-fortieth psalm casts its light upon the destructive power of the slanderer, wishing his absence from the community with the same vehemence that would deny long life to the one who exercises violence by more conventional means:

Do not let the slanderer be established in the land;
let evil speedily hunt down the violent! (Psalm 140:11 NRSV)

Because human opinion is fickle and vulnerable to eloquent lies, slander is to be considered a dangerous habit. Where freedom of speech has enjoyed its unquestioned and totalitarian libertinism, we find it difficult to imagine that a community should see the ‘merely’ verbal violence of slander as a lethal matter. We fool ourselves.

Words matter. They shape conscience, society, and practice. They ennoble the city, they enrage the mob.

Weapons and strong arms gone perverse spill blood. Words do, too.

So, this counter-deceptive prayer: Do not let the slanderer be established in the land.

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Distance is not always what it seems.

The psalms have in common with the book of Isaiah a penchant for inverting the normal correspondences of distance and proximity. Employing the overlap between spatial and moral concepts of height, these voices of the biblical anthology claim that YHWH in his supreme elevation is paradoxically closer to those who are spiritually low than to those who exalt themselves.

For though the LORD is high, he regards the lowly;
but the haughty he perceives from far away. (Psalm 138:6 NRSV)

Pride consists in taking oneself high, near—one might suppose—to God. The psalmist will have nothing of the calculus that equates self-elevation (our English translations go for moral connotations via words like ‘haughtiness’, but the Hebrew text will not abandon the concrete notion of height or altitude) with achievement.

Do you want to be near to YHWH, the writer appears to ask his reader? Do you crave access to the Most High?

Then stay low. YHWH—very high—hangs with the humble.

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The night trembles with specied ambiguity.

It is the time of darkness, yet a candle shines the brighter for it. The dark’s terrors stalk most lethally at night, yet church and temple double their welcome to those who gather then.

Night, like a desert, seems a deathly void. Yet as for those who patiently search the desert’s mysteries, so does night offer a thousand fascinations to the eye that accommodates itself to the night-time’s odder shades.

The night, whether for those who stand at orders through its long stretch or for those who gather to worship at its unrushed hours, is a time to bless the One who made both night and day, then refashions them before our astonished eyes with each turn of the globe.

Come, bless the LORD, all you servants of the LORD, who stand by night in the house of the LORD!

Lift up your hands to the holy place, and bless the LORD.
May the LORD, maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion. (Psalm 131:1-3 NRSV)

Night is a time to bless and a time to receive YHWH’s blessing.

Night is not merely the Nothing that its hurried dismissers, intoxicated by the day’s glare, claim it to be.

The night caresses its own glow, brilliance, blessing.

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In these post-modern days, in which every word and deed is supposed to veil a bare act of power, the Bible and those who express themselves in its pages are often accused of totalitarian urges. The accusation, upon careful review, nearly always rings hollow.

Yet the spirit of our age is familiar with power and at the same time too distracted for nuance, layers, and textures. Sucking that spirit into one’s lungs sets a person up for simplistic explanations and nicely posed theories that, in their own way, are attempts to corral all others into the pen that one knows best. Totalism, though it will not admit to such, is rich with irony.

The final line of the biblical psalter, viewed with glib self-confidence, stands out as a poster child of totalitarian urges. (more…)

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Clearly a reflection upon the creation narrative of Genesis 1, the ‘hallelujah psalm’ that is numbered as the psalter’s 148th brings all of creation into its doxological vortex.

As is customary with biblical praise, the psalm deconstructs reigning mythologies that pose as unquestionable depictions of reality. Sun, moon, and stars—for example—are not merely stripped of their purported power over human beings. That much is already accomplished in Genesis 1. Here, the matter is taken a step further: they join in praising YHWH, and this for an interesting motive: ‘for he commanded and they were created’. (more…)

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