Canter Bridge

The searching eye of the Lord is not always for the biblical writers a pleasant notion. In his agony, Job finds it ruthless. Sinners, we are told, consider it laughable and, sometimes, a paper tiger meant to scare people straight but quite powerless once you get a clear angle on things. (more…)

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No voice speaks more poignantly from exile than the writer of the one hundred thirty-seventh psalm. ‘By the rivers of Babylon’, he explains, ‘we sat and wept for Zion.’

To these captors of the exile Judaeans, the songs of Zion seemed mere entertainment. The exotic accent, the strange musical lilt, must have appeared to offer a respite from empire’s deadening tedium. All they wanted—it didn’t seem like much—was to prod their captives to sing a tune or two from the Old Country. (more…)

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A special bond links those who labor by night. Few volunteer to lay their energies down on the dark side of the day’s cycle. Usually extraneous considerations have made it necessary, often unpleasant ones. The world looks different from the angle of nighttime work. People who have seen it understand this and become part of a loosely linked tribe defined by its members’ shared nocturnal journey.

A psalm speaks to those whose temple assignment finds them waking to their nightly duties while others retire. Fittingly, it is brief and spun of well-wishing.

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 bless you from Zion, he who made heaven and earth! (Psalm 134:1–3 ESV)

One thinks of the night attendant breaking the monotony by mouthing these words quietly from the shadows. He lifts his hand towards the most holy place. From his solitude he blesses the Lord. No one knows except the unseen God who receives the blessing and, more often than not, returns it in grace.

Those, too, who labor through the soul’s dark night recognize each other. From their shadow, they raise a hand towards a holy place. Quietly their lips form their blessing, shaped by darkness, spoken quietly as befits the night and its sounds that carry far.

May it, too, be returned from Zion, speeded to its destination by the maker of heaven and earth. May it rest gently on the shoulder of the one who stands alert in his corner while others sleep, unknowing.

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Often considered one of the soft qualities of personality and character, trust does not immediately associate itself with sturdiness. The iconic self-made man of the American psyche trusts no one but himself. By definition self-reliant, he does not attach his fortune to the reliability of anyone else.

Not so the life of YHWH’s people. Here a different logic holds sway. The very reliability of YHWH establishes a baseline of sturdiness for those who choose to entrust their lot to his character:

Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion,
which cannot be moved, but abides forever.
As the mountains surround Jerusalem,
so the LORD surrounds his people,
from this time on and forevermore. (Psalm 125:1-2 NRSV)

Geographical strongholds stand in as metaphor for YHWH’s existential bedrock. Those who anchor themselves to this most sturdy Protector will themselves be unshakable. A soft quality becomes, in paradox, the hardest.

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Poetry often speaks as clearly by its form as by the words it employs. In such cases, structure trumps sound. This is particularly the case when self-selected rigidities of form limit the poet’s options. In such moments, he can do and must do only what he he has chosen to do.

Take the ‘acrostic psalms’. These unnatural compositions shackle themselves to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, imposing upon the poetic spirit the requirement that it begin the next eight lines of verse with the equivalent of say, ‘c’ or ‘d’ or ‘e’. Like an athlete training with repeated forty-yard sprints even though he knows he’ll never perform exactly that movement after the whistle blows and the frenzy begins, the poet hones his muscles with an acrostic psalm. He finds out what he can do and, in the meantime, discovers facets of reality that the normal, more liquid course of life simply does not throw up. (more…)

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** a wedding gift for J.R. and Molly Friesen, married yesterday in Billings, Montana, USA

The rhythm of life with YHWH includes periods of silence and still others when the only audible sound is a groan. It is the good fortune of those whom YHWH accompanies that this unmelodious moment is, if not short-lived, then at least bound to its season. Despair’s silence and pain’s sigh are conceded their space on the enigmatic score, yet they are not intended to dominate the course from one movement to another nor to usurp the final one.

Rather, the biblical poets alert us to the ambitious, spontaneous eruption of a new song. The thrusting forth of this dance-able melody comes often when least expected and casts all subdominant grief in a new harmonic frame. What a moment ago sounded forth with tyrannical self-confidence is understood now to have been a foil, a prelude, the musical antechamber to ejaculative joy of the kind that no prior musical experience has quite prepared one to encounter. (more…)

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* Dedicated to my friend Rev. Robert Eyman, Spokane, Washington, USA

One of the finest of the so-called ‘Hallelujah Psalms’, the one hundred forty-seventh speaks an encouraging word to the broken-hearted among us. The poet angles in on the appropriateness of praise, recognizing that a universe governed in the way this one is ruled has become a venue where gratitude is the fitting response.

How good it is to sing praises to our God;
for he is gracious, and a song of praise is fitting. (Psalm 147:1 NRSV)

One does not arrive at such a response unreflectively. From every corner evidence presents itself that might well seem to render praise anything but the proper sound in a broken world where blood flows too freely and sorrow gathers in silent, menacing clumps. Yet the psalmist has fought his way to a hermeneutical angle from which his gaze takes in reasons for gratitude rather than resentment. He is convinced his angle is the proper one, not a cheap analgesic, no psychological trick crafted merely to dull the pain. (more…)

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If Paul Simon could find only fifty ways to leave his lover, the writer of Psalm 119 clearly trumps him. Verse after verse of this acrostic poem—meaning that the first letter of each line follows the alphabet in a clearly identifiable pattern—lauds YHWH’s word, law, and promise with language usually reserved for romance.

I rejoice at your word like one who finds great spoil. (Psalm 119:162 NRSV)

Although specific lines from this resolutely focused psalm have found their way into Jewish and Christian spirituality, the psalm itself strikes many modern readers as tedious and—dare one say it—a bit obsessive. A poem like this places a premium on form and then works its content to fit. Even a sympathetic reader is likely to conclude when watching the writer reach for say, a fifth line that begins with the letter ‘ayin’, that the dude should give himself a break. (more…)

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It would be a mistake to read into the Psalm’s rhetoric of the soul—in Hebrew, the נפשׁ (nefesh)—Greek conceptions of an invisible, enduring segment of the human creature. That is not in view, not least when the psalmist gives commands to his soul: ‘Praise the Lord, o my soul!’, ‘Awake, my soul!’, and the like. (more…)

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