Tag: psalms

February 2011

In my family, backbones and upper lips come made of steel. My children are no exception. Before the age of one year, my two eldest children decided to wean themselves, cold-turkey. They probably figured that their mother wouldn’t be able to handle the pain of such a denial herself. Maybe they knew that as soon as I saw in their faces any sign of fear’s lonely, impotent ache, an unstoppable flood of milk and love would pour out from me to cover their anxious whimpers. So they would look deep into my eyes, brokenhearted, but they would not drink.

When we greedily suck life from the material things of this world, and when we lie back, bellies taut, yet shaking in anxiety over our next meal, God, like a mother, can’t help but pour out love upon our fearful cries. I wonder, if, though, to grow, we too need to find ways to wean our souls …. not from God’s love, but from our souls’ newborn dependency upon all that is not God. Psalm 131 is a simple and unpretentious psalm, the only psalm in the Bible that some scholars believe to have been written by a woman. In the original Hebrew, verse 3 reads: “But I still my soul and make it quiet. My soul is silent like a weaned one upon his mother, like a weaned one upon me is my soul.” For the author of Psalm 131, the emotional turmoil of weaning has given way to calm hope, as her soul rests within her, now freed from the worries that come with instant gratification.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus expects us to grow, to stretch ourselves, to seek our life and our nourishment in God’s Kingdom. Jesus does not promise us that we can nurse like newborn babies forever. We must grow, like a child who is weaned, working to find for our full-bellied souls a kind of hiccupping peace in God’s ever-loving arms.

Written January 2011

In the news this week, we have heard much pontification over the power of words. Did the angry, fear-filled words of politicians reach into the deranged mind of the Arizona shooter to incite violence? Do the words of TV hosts and bloggers create, as Matt Bai writes in a New York Times editorial, “a culture of hyperbole … [that has lost its] hold on the power of words.” I was reminded of Psalm 12 (especially striking here in the King James Version):

I have never seen precious metals being refined, but I can picture the tiny, fragile flakes of silver that are held captive within their rocky frame, inseparable at first from the heavy dross that encases them. Only intense heat and mighty flame can transform the ore, melting it, changing its form completely, and allowing it to float freely to the surface. Just as the Word of the Lord, the Word that creates and gives life, passes through the crucible of the Cross, what then in me or in my words must be shattered and burned before it can be true?Like the lips of the evil ones in the psalm, our lips are often so swollen with pride that our words, burdened with false authority, must burst loudly from the prison of our mouths. Or thin lips as cold and miserly as steel squeeze the warmth from our words, as they slide out like gray sleet. Or lips lost in the pleasant sensation of their own movement let airy, thoughtless words do flippant somersaults from ear to ear. Instead, our testimony needs to float upwards through lives that have been tried in earth’s furnace, lives that have been burned and bruised in the fight against oppression and want. Theological and political discourse, without lives broken and refined in the service of justice and mercy, only grasp at a power that they can never truly own.