Canter Bridge

Ascribed to David, this psalm fits well into the historicizing tendency evident already in early biblical manuscripts to link each psalm to a moment in the life of the Israelite king. David’s flight into the Judean desert before the insurrection of Absalom, for example, would accord well with the psalm’s cryptic reference to ‘David, when he was in the desert of Judah’.

Yet one wonders whether the enduring power and pertinence of psalms like this one lie in their power to latch themselves onto the circumstances of our lives rather than to cling to the details of his. Whether the psalm’s memorable ‘dry and thirsty land where there is no water’ was for the writer a physical or a metaphorical location, it continues serving as the latter for us. I can walk over, open the tap, and find virtually no end to the flow of pure liquid. But right here, in this chair, on this morning, I can feel far more deeply than that liquid abundance the leering, bone-dry desert that threatens joy and meaning themselves. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Transparent honesty between God and humankind requires expression. One cannot have intimacy while guarding silence. It is not permitted to us both to hold our guard and dance with our creator.

Both God and man must speak if the perforated boundary between heaven and earth is to yield, if Jerusalem is to descend, if prayers are to reach the altitude where Heaven can hear. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Help is available.

This is the message that the poet who created Psalm 46 underscores in a time when it seems all that is reliable has been shaken. It takes only one earthquake experience to have that existential stake driven into the soul that only comes when the earth moves.

Anything else can be assumed to shift under duress. But the earth is not supposed to move. It us the Unmoved Thing, the stage upon which all manner of furniture makes its scraping sound as it comes, performs its task, and is whisked away. People march, race, crawl, and drag themselves across it, some lingering beyond their welcome, others making us wish they’d stayed.

But the earth itself does not move. (more…)

Read Full Post »

The potency of despair lies in part in the pretense of permanence. When caught in the deathly grip of sadness, we believe this is all we shall ever know. The promise of dawn seems unthinkable.

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God. (Psalm 43:5 NRSV)

There is a reality more concrete than despair, more trustworthy and closer to the core of what is true. Despair clouds our view of it, indeed makes it seem a mirage, a mockery, a tormenting seduction not worth the time it would require to take its measure. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Life thrusts upon us a moment when we are alone with God. In the best variants of this crisis of solitude, family and friends stand by with loving hands extended willingly but to no immediate effect. There is nothing they can do.

One is alone with God. It is a moment of necessary, unavoidable singularity. One discovers, in some ways, who one is on that sparsely populated stage. One finds out who one is not. One encounters God as he can only be known when no one else is in the hall. (more…)

Read Full Post »

‘Can a miracle happen?’, we ask of this or that broken relationship. We linger over the corpse of what was once love and wonder whether there is resurrection or just a bucket of lime to take the edge off the stench.

A key link in the chain of trust and conduct that we call biblical spirituality is the cultivated ability to believe in miracles. To hope in the darkness is not, for the soul shaped by life with YHWH, a mere spitting into the wind. It is the substance of life, death, and the dynamics that link the two, as these things are experienced in that open system that, again, is life with YHWH. (more…)

Read Full Post »

We live in fear that the cry of our heart shall go unheard.

We could bear up better, perhaps, under mockery or derision than in the face of silence. The dread of no reply is no modern invention. It is bred into the circuitry of humanity’s deep need of conversation:

To you, O LORD, I call; my rock, be not deaf to me, lest, if you be silent to me, I become like those who go down to the pit. Hear the voice of my pleas for mercy, when I cry to you for help, when I lift up my hands toward your most holy sanctuary. (Psalm 28:1–2 ESV)

It is the nature of our frailty that our principal capacity in distress is not to resolve the causes of our pain—they are too abundant and too formidable—but to cry out. We seldom need more room to swing our axe, more elbow grease, a little more time to beat down or outwit our assailants. These are the requirement of the strong, but we are weak. (more…)

Read Full Post »

The clear, concrete familiarity of that first line comes on this troubled morning like a gift:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. (Psalm 23:1 NRSV)

For a moment, it burns away the thick underbrush of scarcity, pain, and need. It casts the soil under my feet into sunlight. It brings one near to believing that this thing is true.

Oh, to be shepherded through the longest night, the darkest shadowed valley of abandonment. Oh, to know for a moment the absence of want, the quieting of one’s scream against the madness of things.

A body longs for it to be true more than almost anything else. If this is reality, then all other can be endured.

He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake.

Green pastures. Still waters. Right paths. I can almost recall their shape, feel again the softness under bare feet, the cool of lapping water, the pleasure of a path that aims—however erratically—at a destination rather than petering out in the confused shapelessness of the bush. There was a moment, almost a lifetime really, when joy was the default, when laughter crowded in and flowed down like a rushing stream even when justice seemed to have slowed to a trickle.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff—
they comfort me.

Perhaps this gnawing, soul-gutting solitude is not alone-ness but the slightly skewed perception of being so because the one who accompanies veils himself for reasons only he can know. But does he indeed accompany? Does he walk even here, know the heat of these tears, tune to the uncommon, unrhythmed cacophony of a grown man’s sobs?

It is too much to be believed, this lack of want. Yet maybe it will become true in its moment, even if the darkness does not quickly, does not ever, turn to light.

Read Full Post »

It is fitting that the book of Psalms should end with just this one hundred fiftieth and that the one hundred fiftieth should end with this totalitarian doxology:

Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD! (Psalm 150:6 ESV)

All the other exemplars of that kind of summons to praise in the psalms which scholars since Hermann Gunkel have labeled the hymn provide a reason for the doxology to which they call the assembled worshippers or the ready individual. That motive, that basis for praise is usually an act or a quality of YHWH himself. The psalms do not smile upon the shell of praise when there is no kernel. Not for them the constant whipping up of a congregation to praise more, praise more loudly, praise better. To the contrary, the psalms provoke dense praise. It knows its reasons. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Strength and speed rightly draw admiring eyes.

Whether stallion, sprinter, swimmer, striker, or wide receiver, the ripple of muscled thigh and the cheetah-esque capacity to finish are awe-inspiring. Such forceful, fluid athleticism commends itself. It needs little added praise. (more…)

Read Full Post »