Happy is the one

Singing a way into a dreaming of the Psalms

You know how it’s been for me since last June, when I stumbled into a stretch of the Damascus Road that runs secret along the Victoria Line of the London Underground. I mean that shift of gravity that I can only call by the name “conversion.” You’ll remember me recounting how suddenly I was struck, amid the swaying and banter and laughter of a group of Italian schoolkids as they came tumbling aboard—struck by the shine of their souls big enough to fill the universe, by the radical precious value of creatureliness in each one, and by the unassailable force that holds these together, which can only be called love. I wanted you to understand that for me, who too often finds passing notions or appearances “quite striking,” this perception was not a matter of being struck by a thought, but of being intoxicated and reorganized in a flash, riven and re-pieced into a new way of seeing.

It’s not that it wasn’t there—it was only that I couldn’t hear it. In one of the many theological dialogues in Cormac McCarthy’s books (this one from The Crossing, I think), someone observes that we only know God’s voice when it falls silent—when at the end of life we realize that the Divine had been speaking all along. Like the horses at night, another interlocutor suggests, whose grazing is only heard when the sudden silence of its ceasing wakes the sleeping riders from their bedrolls.

While this return to the wildness, weight, and weirdness of the Bible has been nourishing, regions of struggle and doubt remain. (May they never fade altogether!) Such places teem for me in the Psalms. I just don’t know how to read them. It’s all the smiting, the enemies, the wickedness; for every fruitful tree by flowing waters, there’s a baby dashed to the ground. There’s loads of scholarship and exegetics and apologetics about this, I know. (Have you found a way through the Psalms? I’d love to learn what's helped you move through them. Or maybe the whole thing turns you off. Maybe you’re worried for me now.) Anyway, what I’m trying to do for now is to treat them like a kind of dream. You know, how your therapist once said that everything in a dream is you? That enemy tribe bending low to lick the desert dust—it’s you. The wicked wearing their pride like a necklace? You. The stronghold of life, the level path, the flowing waters—you, you, you.

Which is to say, it’s me. Seeing the wicked ones within me, thinking how often I do battle with my own self, is giving me a way into David’s songbook.

I’ve made a start with Psalm 1. The problem of the wicked is there from the first—”Happy is the one who does not take the counsel of the wicked for a guide”—but by 1:3, the image arrives of a tree planted alongside flowing water, with foliage that never fades but forevers in abundance. The second half of the Psalm, however, seems to throw the wicked under the bus: “They are like chaff driven before the wind” who “when judgment comes… will not stand firm…. The way of the wicked is doomed.”

You know how I planned to stop in New Harmony, Indiana, on the way to visit mom in Illinois? The site of two utopian experiments in the first part of the nineteenth century, the town was important to theologian Paul Tillich, who influenced the philanthropy that supported its renascence in the mid twentieth century, and whose ashes are interred there.

Paul Tillich memorialized in New Harmony

Tillich is memorialized at New Harmony. Amid a waterside grove of pines a short walk from the banks of the Wabash, with the Chapel of the Little Portion shining in reflection, his memorial stone invokes the verse about the fruitful tree.

And yet Tillich knew that we finally find ourselves not in fruitful flourishing, but precisely in the midst of our withering. In his famous sermon, “You Are Accepted,” Tillich asks, “Do we still know that it is arrogant and erroneous to divide men by calling some ‘sinners’ and others ‘righteous’?” He proposes a renewal of the old understanding of sin as the state of separation. And separation, he contends, is the basis of our existence; in a sense, it is existence itself. It lends our experience a kind of parallax view, through which experience of both light and dark become possible.

With Tillich, the Psalm’s ways of the wicked and paths of the righteous begin to seem like a map of the meandering routes of life in all their forking variation. And yet they meander along the way of the living waters, where grace flows, sometimes to flood in on us—

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness.… It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!"

I don’t get the fruit without the flood, the tree without the chaff, the seed without the riving wind. The light comes dappled through the play of everlasting foliage. It shines in the dark, and yet the darkness does not overcome. I’ll sing it like that.

Happy is the one who’s hasn’t walked in the way of the wicked
Or followed in the paths of pain
Or sat in the company of scorn
His delight is in the word of the Holy One
It is in his meditations day and night
He shall be like a tree that fruits by flowing water
Leaves that ever prosper in green

But that is not the way it goes for me when I walk in the wicked
For then I’m like the straw
I swirl and blow and scatter on the wind
And then I cannot stand upright
The light and life and water feel like judgment
But He knows the way it goes on paths that ever brighter
My wickedness shall wither away.