Insight Trails

Moving to faith

By Jon Berry

“For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works…” – Psalm 139, v. 13-14

    Are you religious? It’s a question I’ve never gotten used to – though not for a lack of being asked. I live in a part of the country where most people sleep in, head out for day trips, or queue up at restaurants for brunch on Sunday morning. 

    Sometimes I explain how I’m taking classes for an MDiv and am hoping to make the next stage of my life more about giving back, maybe as a hospital chaplain, and write about my spiritual travels.

    Sometimes I talk about how everything shifted for me when I read the root of religion is “religare,” to bind, and realized how much I was bound to.

    But sometimes I say “some days more than others.”

    Faith – that the arc of the universe bends toward justice, as Dr. King says; that practicing the steps can lead to serenity, as AA and Al-Anon friends aver; that an “ocean of light” can be found amid the ocean of darkness that life seems to hold, as George Fox said – is a process for me. Often it feels like two-steps-forward, one-step-back.

    It’s also, I’ve come to see, a journey I don’t have to take alone.

    Psalm 139 captures those two sides. It is one of the most introspective and intimate of psalms – almost Rumi-like – a halting, hesitant journey toward relationship with [fill in your preferred term – God; the Divine; Wonder; the Cosmos; this seems to me to be one of the most flexible psalms].

    But as with all the psalms it is also profoundly communal, said aloud and discussed in communal settings, and recited in private devotion by others before us over thousands of years.

    As I reread it this week, it became a conversation:

    “O Lord, you have searched me and know me, You know when I sit down and when I rise up.” (v 1) Across the ages, readers have found comfort in this psalm's belief that, no matter where you are, you are not alone. This has made Ps 139 one of the most beloved psalms. And one of the most poignant, a psalm that martyrs recited on the way to their deaths (an image that stops me in my tracks every time I read this psalm).

    “Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.” (v 4) Ps 139’s intimacy has, for some, a sharper edge. Some see this as a judging psalm. Calvin saw in Ps 139 proof that God saw all; there was no evading God.

    “You hem me in, behind and before…” (v 5) Some see these words not as protective – God in the image of the good shepherd, keeping us on course – but threatening. The word translated in the New Revised Standard Bible as “hem” has connotations of besiegement. But it also can mean “shaped,” as a potter shapes a pot. Which makes most sense? Is the God of Ps 139, as one commentator asks, “enemy or friend?"

    For reasons that aren’t clear, something then shifts in the psalm. Its imagery moves from outside – the Eternal being in the heights and the depths of the world, in darkness and light  (a poetic device, merism, in which opposites evoke the full spectrum) – to inside: the landscape within the psalmist.

    The psalmist realizes he/she is part of creation. These are the lines I quoted at the beginning of this essay. Suspicion shifts to awe. God goes, in one scholar's words, from “intimidating outsider” to “nurturing insider,” which then leads to trust. “I come to the end – I am still with you.” (v 18).

    This is not, though, the end. The psalmist, in another switchback, ruminates on “the wicked" - in fact, prays for death for those who do not see God as he/she now does (“I hate them with perfect hatred.” v 22). It’s a strange turn, and, again, one that commentators don’t agree on. Some see the ever-present threat of enemies and conflict in the psalmist's era; others anxiety; some a warning to avoid the trap of self-righteousness - two steps forward, one step back.

    But, then, the impulse recedes. The psalmist seems to catch him/herself, see his/her potential to harm, and solicit help: “Test me…know my thoughts. See if there is a wicked way in me…lead me in the way everlasting.” (v 24) The journey ends where, at the beginning, seemed so distant: relationship.

*

For the full text of Psalm 139, click here.

    The primary source of this essay is “Certainty, Ambiguity, and Trust: Knowledge of God in Psalm 139,” by Carolyn Pressler, in A God So Near: Essays on Old Testatment Theology in Honor of Patrick D. Miller (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), pp. 91-99

    I also cite the notes to Psalm 139 in The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 885-886, and Robert Alter's translation notes (Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary [New York: WW Norton & Co., 2007], p. 479

Reconnecting

By Jon Berry

A few weeks ago I heard someone describe Higher Power as the web of connections. It’s not something “up there” or “out there” but “in here” in us. He was talking about people, the insight from someone unknown to us that gets handed from person to person until it reaches us just when we need it.

I think that web can also be music (Duke Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose” for me one recent morning). Or seeing messages from my kids light up my phone. Or being out in the city with everything in bloom.

I need all the connections I can get at the moment. Between work and my studies, I’ve been locked away.

A few semesters ago, researching my final paper for a class, and feeling isolated and alone, I found guidance across the ages from someone 1,600 years ago. After trying unsuccessfully to pin down what God was, Augustine wrote about how God made him feel:

“…the light that shines upon my soul which no place can contain; that voice which no time can take from me; that fragrance which no wind scatters; the food which is not lessened by eating; the embrace which satiety never comes to sunder.”

Sometimes, when I’m lost spiritually, the way back is not figuring out “what” my Higher Power is – which, even in good times, is like cupping minnows from a stream – but “how” it feels in me.

(The quote is from Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions [Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2006], Book 10, Part 6. Look for the FJ Sheed translation with Peter Brown's introduction).

Reimagining God

By Jon Berry

What if we thought of God as female? It’s not so much of a stretch. In addition to all the masculine images in the Bible, there are feminine ones as well.* Psalm 22 compares God to a midwife (“Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast. On you I was cast from my birth,” v. 9-10). Ps 131 envisions “a weaned child with its mother.” (v. 2) In the New Testament, Jesus compares his work to a hen gathering her brood (Matt 23.37).

    George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, 3½ centuries ago challenged  the church to recognize that the spirit of Christ spoke “in the female as well as the male.” “The Light is the same in the male and the female,” said Fox. “And it cometh from Christ… And who is it that dare stop Christ’s mouth?” (This passage has been set, remarkably, to plainsong by the Quaker songwriter Paulette Meier.)

    There’s good reason one of the movements in Biblical scholarship has been to reimage God in the feminine. Women are, after all, the majority of churchgoers, at least in the Western world. And many come to church with wounds inflicted by men.

    I’ve been thinking about this since reading in my professors’ notes on Psalm 23 that a case can be made for reading the Good Shepherd as female. In biblical tradition women as well as men are shepherds. “Zipporah and her sisters came to the well to water their father’s flock. Rachel…arrived at the well with her father’s flock, ‘for a shepherd [was] she.’” In much of the world, young women continue to be shepherds.

    I’ve long had an uneasy relationship with Ps 23. I heard it before I read it – before I knew how to read – and never heard the punctuation in the first verse. I thought it read “The Lord is [the] shepherd I shall not want.” Why would you want a shepherd you don’t want?

    Since Ps 23 was said so often at funerals – and, from an early age, I went to funerals – I thought it was about the shepherd who led you to death: the Grim Reaper. The shepherd with his crook: death. Laying down in green pastures: death. The river: Styx. The valley of the shadow of death: death. Rather than seeing the anointing and cup-runneth-over as symbols of a happy life, I saw them as funeral rituals. Dwelling in the house of the Lord forever: heaven. Psalm 23 was to me the psalm of death and, frankly, that wasn’t a notion I especially wanted to entertain as a kid; I was more into living. 

    Seeing the shepherd, instead, as a woman, with the qualities that might entail – strong, watchful, caring, protective, for example – could over time move this Psalm back into the realm of life for me. Ditto some of the nuances of new translations, such as reading the last line of Ps 23, in Hebrew, should not be “forever” but “for many long days.” “The viewpoint of this poem,” writes the translator Robert Alter, "is in and of the here and now and is in no way eschatological. The speaker hopes for a happy fate all his born days, and prays for good fortune to abide in the Lord’s sanctuary, a place of security and harmony.”

    For me that works.

*

* Since I’ve written this essay for a class on Psalms, I am writing about the Western tradition; feminine images of God in other cultures would be another essay.

To read Psalm 23, click here. The link is to the NRSV, but you can toggle to other versions, including the King James (the one many of us grew up with).

To learn about or buy “Timeless Quaker Witness in Plainsong,” Paulette Meier’s wonderful, spare recordings of quotations from early Friends, click here.  

The class notes for Psalm 23 quote Ezekial, by Nancy Bowen (Nashville: Abingdon, 2010), p. 213-214; for more on that book, or to buy a copy, click here.

My last paragraph quotes Robert Alter’s wonderful, earthy, new translation, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary” (New York: WW Norton, 2009), p. 80. For more information, or to buy a copy, click here.

Last, women, increasingly, are also "shepherds" of church congregations as ministers; click here for a wonderful essay, by a Presbyterian pastor from Pennsylvania, drawing out this image.

The problem of enemies

By Jon Berry

“IT IS NOT ENEMIES WHO TAUNT ME – I COULD bear that; it is not adversaries who deal insolently with me – I could hide from them. But it is you, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend, with whom I kept pleasant company…” – Psalm 55, v. 12-14

You don’t have to go far into Psalms to discover its preoccupation with conflict. It is the subject of the first sentence of the first Psalm: “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked.” (Ps 1:1) Psalms – lyrical, beautiful, beloved Psalms – is teeming with conflict. Of the about 1,100 times that the words “enemy,” “enemies,” “wicked,” or “evil” occur in the Old Testament, 25% are in Psalms. No other book in the O.T. comes close.

    It’s tempting to gloss over – to see the seething as products of a violent, bygone era, or religion-building (“It appears to belong to the invention of piety that one considers certain people as enemies,” writes one scholar), or to turn it into a metaphor for illness or inner conflict.

    But as I write this, troops of one of the world’s powers are massed on the border of a smaller nation. Every morning, when I walk to work, I pass by the 9/11 memorial at the site of the former World Trade Center in Manhattan.

    I sometimes harbor notions that I'm above conflict. I'm a member of the Society of Friends, after all, one of the traditional peace churches. But, in truth, I'm not. It piles up in my email inbox. And in life. Some is political; something I am part of because of a group I belong to. Some, though, is personal. The question is, what do I do with it?

    In Psalms, we have, handed down through thousands of years, ritualized ways of dealing with conflict. Rather than quashing dark feelings like anger and fear, Psalms gives voice to them. And it does so in specific, stylized ways. “Complaint” Psalms articulate, in often wrenching detail, what the speaker is going through – in Ps 55, turmoil made all the more acute because it turns out to be at the hand of a friend.

    “With speech smoother than butter, but with a heart set on war; with words that were softer than oil, but in fact were drawn swords,” the psalmist has been set up.

    But complaint psalms don’t leave it at that. Each, as a prayer, becomes an address to God containing a request: What, specifically, does the psalmist want? Sometimes it is revenge; sometimes refuge, redemption, or peace (requests made, importantly, to God, rather than taken into the speaker's own hands). In Ps 55, it seems to be some of each. Complaint Psalms also include an expression of trust (e.g. “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you” in Ps 55). Most also have a promise to praise God. And insofar as the Psalms were voiced aloud in the congregation, they were communal as well. It’s thought that Ps 55 was said with its foe present – a direct challenge, in the presence of the community.

    I’m not sure, 2,000-plus years on, if the ways we handle conflict are so much better.

*

To read Psalm 55, click here.

The word counts above are based on my key-word searches using the online New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) Bible. The New Testament, if you’re wondering, has a bit under 500 occurrences of “enemy,” “enemies,” “wicked,” and “evil.” But it’s also a shorter collection.

Seeing love

By Jon Berry

“…MY HEART IS NOT LIFTED UP, MY EYES ARE NOT raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

    “But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.” – Psalm 131

    This is what love looks like. I didn’t realize it in the moment. Time was running out. I’d been visiting for a week and had not taken a photo. My bags were packed. In a few minutes we’d be leaving for the airport. Come here, I said. I pulled Dad close and snapped a handful of photos. None were right. We both looked a bit awkward, a bit in a hurry.

    So I pulled him closer and without thinking planted a big kiss on his cheek. And in an instant the years peeled away, and my dad broke out in a pure, spontaneous grin.

    I’m not sure what love is. The word is so deceptively simple. But I think, with time, I’m beginning to learn how to recognize it. That feeling of beingwith; feeling that hand nestled in yours; that head resting on your shoulder; the shoulder where you can rest your head; knowing there’s nowhere you’d rather be; not needing to be anything other than what you are.

    It’s that sense, I believe, that Psalm 131 describes. It’s only a wisp of a poem, just three verses, 67 words. It begins in negation – Not. Not. Not. The love we seek, it says – the love that connects us to All – cannot not be found up there, nor out there, nor in possessions or achievements, “the great” and “marvelous.” It’s not without but within.

    Psalm 131’s central image, the weaned child with its mother, is so un-Old Testament. There are no burning bushes; no walls falling; no cataclysms. And it’s so perfect: independent, yet dependent, the feeling that continues to draw me home, after all these years, to the farm, my dad, and the renewal they bring.

    Within the particular is the portal to the eternal. In the love of the child and the parent is the image of how we are to be with ourselves and in the world. It’s when we let down our walls, and accept our dependence, that peace and love can come in.

*

For the full text of Psalm 131, click here.

In Deep

By Jon Berry

“DEEP CALLS TO DEEP at the thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows have gone over me.” – Psalm 42, v. 7

    “So what happened?” It was a simple enough question. For four years, I’d blogged on a question that had increasingly preoccupied me – how some people wound up doing interesting, spiritual work, and what the rest of us could learn from them. The pursuit had led me into all kinds of tangents – meditation, discernment, memoir. And then, three years ago, I stopped.

    I responded to the friend, who’d looked me up after stumbling upon the blog, with stories. This happened. That happened.

    A shorter, more accurate answer would be that life overtook me. I got swallowed up. Sent to the depths. In deep.

    When I first read the words “deep to deep” in Psalm 42, I thought they described a mystical experience: from my depths, I find Infinite Depth. There is some of that, I think. But mostly this Psalm, which contains some of the lushest writing of all Psalms (beginning with its opening stanza, “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God”), is about yearning for a connection that’s lost. The psalmist is “cast down,” a phrase repeated three times in Ps 42’s eleven verses.  It’s not an easy place.

    “Tehom,” the Hebrew word translated as “deep” here, is primordially dark and deep; it's the abyss. Tehom is the word used in the first sentence of the Bible, before there is light: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” (Gen 1.2)

    There’s chaos in this realm. “Being distant from the saving God is like being in the power of the chaotic sea,” notes one scholar. The full verse in Psalms, ending with roars of “cataracts” (waterspouts) and “breakers and waves” surging over the poet, is an echo from Jonah, as he is about to be snapped up by the whale: “You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the sea, and the flood surrounded me; and all your waves and your billows passed over me” (Jonah 2.3). The psalmist is in the belly of the beast.

    It’s comforting to know that more than 2,000 years ago, someone experienced what we feel today. Psalm 42 does not offer an easy way out. It ends, instead, with a small, simple reminder to hope. “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him.” This, too, seems enough. Insofar as the words have been repeated across the millennia, in private devotion and cathedral choirs, they carry through the eons a second message: You’re not alone.

*

To read the full Psalm, click on the link for NRSV or King James version.

Psalms of the city

By Jon Berry

"CAN YOU HELP ME?" THE BEDRAGGLED, SLIGHTLY wild-haired man wove his way down the platform of the 59^th Street subway station, waving a piece of paper. He was obviously homeless. The morning commuters stepped back en masse, like the parting of the Red Sea. His eyes alighted finally on mine. “Hey,” I found myself saying. “What do you need?” I didn’t know him. But I’d talked with enough guys like him while visiting a friend who’s been in and out of the mental wards of New York hospitals to take the risk.

    “I need to get to Brooklyn,” he said. He showed me the paper. It was a discharge form from the hospital. The usual. With hospital’s constrained budgets, there’s no money to transport most mental patients to the halfway house or shelter that will be their next stop. So the hospital gives them a subway pass and directions. I walked him across the platform and told him to look for the subway with the orange circle, the B or the D, and get on, and ask someone to point out when he gets to his stop.

    Over the past few years, I’ve come to feel that the Psalms are being lived out in the streets of New York and everywhere else across the country where people are being turned out of hospitals, homes, jobs, and life with no clear sense of where to go or what to do. “Dear God: I need a miracle,” read the cardboard sign I saw recently in the Union Square subway station. Behind it was a gaunt young man, sitting on the floor, knees drawn up to his chin.

    The other day, I got into a conversation with a guy in his 20s sitting outside Trinity Church across from Wall Street. “Can you help?” read his sign. “War vet waiting for benefits.” I asked him what he was applying for. He knew about the main ones my friend’s secured (Medicaid; food stamps; reduced-fare subway tickets). Housing is tough. The vet said that when he gets enough panhandling, he takes the ferry to Staten Island, where there’s a cheap SRO hotel. He doesn’t like to go to the Bellevue men’s shelter; his stuff always gets ripped off when he was asleep.

    A guy I see periodically on my morning commute (“Got any food to spare?” is his usual line) – who turns out to be pretty friendly – has a girlfriend in New Jersey. But when he’s not with her he sleeps in the subway tunnels. Church steps are popular. Lenny, whom I met the other night when a friend came back to find a ticket on her car (“I would have told you not to park here if I’d been here,” he averred), says he’s been sleeping on the steps of a church down the block from me for a year and a half. Another says he goes to an all-night Internet café in Chinatown.

    Help. Miracles. Refuge. Peace.

    As an adult, I’ve re-entered Psalms from time to time looking for solace in times when my life was turned upside down. It's one of a handful of texts that are my "go-to's" when I'm in need of what a professor of mine calls "conversation partners across time and space." Some are from the Western wisdom traditions -- Job. Ecclesiastes. Some are poets and novelists from the near distant past -- Hopkins, Dickens. Some are music. I need them, I find, and not only for what I get; in them, I find, in the words of one scholar, "someone who understands me."

    Over the next few weeks, I’m reentering this blog – which has been quiet for altogether too long – to see what Psalms I’m reading for a class this semester can say to my experiences today.

    Mostly what comes to mind when I think of Psalms are images -- fitting, as they're, essentially, poems: psalmists who wish for “wings like a dove” to “fly away” to some safe haven (Psalm 55); yearn for connection “as a deer longs for flowing streams” (Psalm 42); who feel their days are passing “like smoke” (Psalm 142); and, occasionally, the faithful, whose spirit is “like trees planted by streams of water” (Psalm 1). Sometimes a phrase breaks through -- lately, “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and saves the crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34)

    They've become lectio divina, words to turn over in my morning meditation and think about the people I see and talk to. I hope that God is near to the broken-hearted and crushed in spirit. “God is in the midst of the city,” says Psalm 46. I hope so.