More thoughts about this Sunday...

This Sunday I will speak personally and passionately about my deepest hope for our up-coming sabbatical. It will be my musical, mystical reflection on Psalm 42 and Matthew 9:13. While I have never been shy in speaking about my own circuitous journey of faith, this Sunday I am going to trust that what is most personal is also most universal. I know this to be true in poetry as well as in visual and performance art; Sunday will be, therefore, an act of faith that what is true in art rings equally true for worship. 

Psalm 42 begins with one of the most sensual and evocative sentences in the whole of our Scriptures:  As a deer yearns for streams of water, so I yearn for You, O God.  Robert Alter brings wisdom to this poem/prayer when he writes: "The poignancy of this famous line reflects the distinctive tone of this supplications, which instead of emphasizing the speaker's suffering expresses above all his passionate longing for God." The Psalmist raises her voice to the Lord even while feeling separate - a distance from God every bit as painful as when Israel was separated from the Temple in Jerusalem by enemies.  Three other insights are moving to me:

+ First, the first-person pronoun in this Psalm - nafshi - is translated as "my whole being" in the next verse. It is used in both verse 2 and 3 - the "I" of the opening line is amplified by the "I" in the following line - an "I" that means "my whole being." So let's be clear that this soul's essence is aching for holy intimacy. Hers is an embodied faith that is both sensual and spiritual simultaneously. No binary thinking here segregating  the holy from the human. This prayer is about yearning that could literally mean the "sound a thirsty deer makes as it drinks" or evokes the movement of "the animal's bending its neck towards the water." (Alter, The Psalms, p. 148)

+ Second, the embodied yearning of this prayer thirsts - another sensual word - for the Living God. Scholars note that this thirst amplifies the simile of the deer's thirst. It also gently invites us to recall the implied Hebrew phrase, living water, meaning fresh, potable water in all its cool refreshment. Other sensual images include:  tears became my bread (eating salt tears for nourishment in his grief); and pouring out her heart - again nafshi - to suggest an emptying of the complete self.

+ Third, the complex challenge of "deep calls unto deep." We wrestled with this at midday Eucharist yesterday and came up with a few possibilities. Alter suggests that the "deep" the Psalmist is experiencing is related to both the mountains of Lebanon and an experience of near death by drowning in "the breakers and waves that have surged over me." Again, there is nothing abstract or intellectualized in his psalm. It is all visceral. Alter puts it like this:

The geological or cosmic "deeps" of the first verset are transformed into a metaphor for the speaker's distress. The experience of threatened drowning is a familiar image for near death in the Psalms, but here it is given startling new power through the linkage with a vast creation in which abyss calls to abyss.

In my spirituality, I make a living connection between Psalm 42 and Matthew 9:13 where Jesus tells some of the teachers of his day: Go learn what this means: I desire mercy, not religion. By quoting the Hebrew prophet Hosea to his opponents, I hear Jesus both affirming his commitment to Judaism (something so many Christians never grasp) while celebrating the prophetic tradition of Isaiah, Jeremiah and the feisty poets of the north. His admonition is NOT about supplanting Judaism as we've simplistically taught one another (even if it was unintentional.) Rather, it is about the prophets' call to compassion. It is about a way of living and a way of praying with our lives that heals what is broken.  It is about yearning for God's wholeness in the body and the body politic. It is about shalom.

I first discovered and embraced these words of Jesus during my divorce 20+ years ago. When I was able to move into that hard and broken decision in the faith that new life was possible beyond the pain, most of my evangelical friends deserted me. They not only shunned me and judged me harshly - without ever asking about my reality - but they made certain that they maligned me whenever possible. To say that I was stunned by this abandonment would be too generous. But there was a love greater than my emptiness, too. As I walked through that time of shadows, three unexpected friends reached out to me: a lesbian, a marginalized Roman Catholic priest and a politico. Having known rejection and judgment themselves, they had the courage and compassion to share mercy rather than religion. And when I read those words in Matthew's gospel, another veil was lifted.

This Sunday we'll be using some brilliant musical compositions from the jazz world to evoke the feelings and sensations of mercy, longing and God's grace.  And then we'll gather around the Lord's table and share the bread and wine of Eucharist.

credits:
1) fineartamerica.com
2) www.youtube.com