Canter Bridge

In the biblical milieu, love for God is far from sentimentalism. One attaches himself to YHWH, one adores him, one finds his own story as a subset of YHWH’s adventurous engagement with the world for reasons that are only remotely connected to feeling and what might in some circles be called religious ardor.

These things have their place. Memorably, the prototypical king David dances half-naked around YHWH’s primary piece of furniture as it is making its trek to the place in Zion that it would one day seem always to have belonged. When criticized for his lack of decorum, David responds that he ‘will become even more undignified than this’. Yet it is not the strength of one’s religious affections that matters in the biblical story. They are well and good when they respond accurately to YHWH’s activity in his world. But they are far from a cause. (more…)

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The crescendo is a central feature of biblical praise. The dynamic of adoration is such that increasing numbers of worshippers become caught up in its centering force.

Yet if it centers—by this I mean that it fixes the creature’s gaze on what is most true about the created whole of which he is a member—it also de-centers, for its force flows outward. Almost by definition, praise is a centrifugal force, its contagious potency captivating ever larger circles in its noisy work. (more…)

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The psalmist in his predicament will sometimes quote the Lord’s recorded words back to him, at times with an audacious tone of holding YHWH accountable to his prior commitments. At other times, as in the eighty-sixth psalm, the intention seems more benign. Stricken by the persistent assault of his adversaries, the poet places YHWH’s self-revealing words—traced by the biblical witness back to the revelation to the divine name recorded in the early chapters of the book of Exodus—over against the unyielding facts of his distress.

But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.  (Psalm 86:15 NRSV)

It is curious that the psalmist should counterpoise YHWH’s patient love to relentless attack. Clearly he is not invoking the slow pace of divine anger with regard to his enemies, for he should doubtless prefer to see them vaporized in a moment. Rather, there may be a covert admission of his own unworthiness for God’s rescue. He makes his rather urgent appeal in the language of slow provocation because he hopes that YHWH’s own patience with him will have kept him on the list of persons for whom God’s favor can reasonably be anticipated.

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The psalms are full of hopeful assertiveness that ‘I shall never be shaken’.

Such confidence, even when it is more fragile than its articulation might appear, grounds itself in the world’s presumed moral stability. That is, justice exists and justice shall prevail. If one cannot trust in this feature of YHWH’s craftsmanship, then little else matters. (more…)

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Life as often as not places us far from where we’d rather be.

Such unruly distance can be resented, resisted, can become the root gland of our bitterest spittle. Alternatively, we embrace the far place as a feature of our vocation. From there we send out what roots we may, we become schooled in affection for the adoptive place, yet still we speak our restless longing for the distant city that endures as our heart’s habitation. We even name that far place home. (more…)

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Twice in this short prayer the psalmist urges God to move more quickly. He knows his own extinction will be the price of divine nonchalance:

Be pleased, O God, to deliver me.
O LORD, make haste to help me! (Psalm 70:1 NRSV)

And again:

But I am poor and needy;
hasten to me, O God!
You are my help and my deliverer;
O LORD, do not delay!

While he waits for God to show a proper sense of urgency, the pray-er divides humankind into that simple dualism which impresses itself upon the harassed mind as the truest description of his neighbors. Exquisitely, both parties are on a quest. One seeks the psalmist’s life. The other pursues God.

Artistry here captures in brief what in another genre fills tomes of sociology and psychology, as it should. The psalmist, faced with his demise, has little time for the details in which a more leisurely science indulges. As he’s been pushed closer to the cliff, an urgent reductionism has become his philosophy. (more…)

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The sixty-eighty Psalm refers to a marching deity with an archaic expression that might be translated as titular: ‘He of Sinai’.

Israel’s faith does not begin with abstractions nor with generalizations about a cosmic deity and his unchanging rules. Rather, faith in YHWH begins for Israel with memory of an upending liberation from the invincible power that was Egypt, her captor. In time, Israel’s faith will generate exquisite statements about creation and its solidity, about the timeless structures of reality under YHWH’s rule, about the wisdom that is required to inhabit such a place. (more…)

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Biblical spirituality comprehends that extreme crisis of body and soul in which a human being finds himself terrified, anguished, and undone in the presence of YHWH. At times the soul’s calamity experiences YHWH’s accusing silence as his only, unholy communication:

O LORD, do not rebuke me in your anger,
or discipline me in your wrath.
Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am languishing;
O LORD, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror.
My soul also is struck with terror,
while you, O LORD—how long? (Psalm 6:1-3 NRSV)

Bold, fear-challenging vigor comes to us in such prayers. They provide words for that moment when few seem capable of taking up the angst that seems sufficient to kill us but chooses instead the less bearable determination to prolong our suffering while the heavens remain silent. (more…)

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The biblical psalms are intensely realistic, particularly those that are born in a bed of conflict.

No pious evasiveness, no pollyanish denial shows its face in this genre of the biblical anthology. One counts the enemy with subdued precision, missing not a one. Indeed the third psalm, a point in the psalter when things are only just finding their stride, begins with just such a declaration:

O LORD, how many are my foes!
Many are rising against me. (Psalm 3.1 ESV)

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A young man comes close to swooning at unity’s bliss. It seems a euphoric thing, an unvariegated meeting of minds, the centering of disparate lives around a perfect truth. It is an idea with which he can fall in love, an intoxicating perfection, an abstraction that seems to him worth the whole world. (more…)

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