Canter Bridge

One should spare a merciful thought for the writer of an acrostic.

Whether required to bend his pen to the task or the victim of his own enthusiastic but self-incarcerating ambition, the man or woman who sits down to write a poem wherein each sequence of lines begins with the same letter of the alphabet does not merit our scorn. If his result sounds wooden or inauthentic he deserves, at worst, our pity and, more charitably, the benefit of our aesthetic doubts.

Take the writer of the exceedingly long one hundred and nineteenth psalm, for example. Some ninety-seven verses into his long, parallelistic slog, he wrestles with the glories of YHWH’s revelation, on the one hand, and the letter mem (the Hebrew equivalent of our English letter m) on the other. (more…)

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Worship is a crystallized form of proximity to YHWH. The joy and completion we feel in worship do not demean similar experience elsewhere, for ‘liturgy’ is expansive without hegemony, inclusive with no eradicating instincts. Worship’s embrace shelters those it gathers in but none is lost there, none negated.

Though worship is an intensified version of wider life lived before YHWH, there is nothing like it.

Worship is paradoxical to the bone, for though YHWH ‘fills both heaven and earth’, as the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, it is worth the trek to his house to encounter him as he can be known nowhere else.

Some are fortunate enough to linger in that dwelling place.

Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself
in which to set her young,
near Your altar, O LORD of hosts,
my king and my God.
Happy are those who dwell in Your house;
they forever praise You. (Psalm 84:4-5 JPS)

We come in, we go out. We make pilgrimage, we return home. We weep, shout, lift our hands, stomp our feet, spin our bodies like a top without the embarrassment we would feel in doing so anywhere else, because to stand before YHWH’s altar is like nothing else we know.

Yet it is like everything, for all life lived purposefully culminates in this, in doxology.

We may admire the fortunate sparrow and the swallow, who bears and nurtures her young in the rafters of YHWH’s house, so close that her babies might topple onto his altar were they to stray too early from the confines she has lovingly built for them. Yet we cannot stay, as she does. We can only depart when the hour for homeward things is due, worship so sewn into our hearts that we live longing for our next visit to this place, so like the rest of our lives, so unlike anything, so near to YHWH whose invitation shall one day no longer speak of adjournment.

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The biblical tradition struggles mightily with the apparent excesses of YHWH’s commitment to David and his city.

It is unlike the Mosaic tradition to make promises without outlining the responsibilities that accrue to divine generosity. Yet one or two of the classic ‘Davidic’ or ‘Zion’ covenantal statements do just that. In my judgement, the largest theological errors lie by the side of the road where one attempts to restrict divine liberty. Still, we ought to consider the possibility that an implicit conditionality inhabits even the most absolute YHWH-promises to David and his offspring. At the end of the day, YHWH is in the biblical drama a master at the creative rescuing of situations placed in peril by human weakness, stubbornness, or both.

If these caveats sound obtuse and at some remove from the text that lies before us, they are not unlinked to it. The tradition’s very struggle suggests that angles of view that we might label as ‘theological’ emerge from the content of the YHWH-promises themselves.

Leave it to the psalms—arguably one of the less cautious genres when it comes to articulating things that really matter—to juxtapose YHWH’s sure oath to David to an outsized if that towers above Zion and its royal/religious edifices:

The LORD swore to David a sure oath
from which he will not turn back:
‘One of the sons of your body
I will set on your throne.
If your sons keep my covenant
and my decrees that I shall teach them,
their sons also, forevermore,
shall sit on your throne.’ (Psalm 132:11-12 NRSV)

Though a pedantic logician might swallow hard at the appearance of naive contradiction, the tradition that is here inscripted is conscious of two realities. First, the poetic legacy is well aware of YHWH’s inscrutable decisiveness. Second, it will not disavow the deeply rooted responsibility that YHWH’s uncanny way with those upon whom his love falls presses into the lives of those who seem rarely to have reached out to him. More often such people—David chief among them—become ensnared in the web of divine amour. They find it difficult—if, in theory, not impossible—to break free from the tenacious, enwrapping netting that has found their feet, their legs, their arms, then all of them.

YHWH promises. Human beings more or less screw up the postlude. YHWH finds a way.

On such a dialectic redemption, this world, and the next appear somewhat safely—if not without tragedy—to hang.

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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. (more…)

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Occasionally a psalm, as though on a sunny afternoon with a glass of Merlot in hand and feet up, allows itself to savor the comprehensive provision of YHWH. Such is not a moment for fretting. There will be time enough for that.

The poet simply allows himself a lyrical sigh of contentment.

Psalm 65, in that vein of relaxed contemplation, casts its eye over the wide, satisfying goodness into which YHWH has brought his people. (more…)

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