A VAST POEM - DEPTH AND POWER

It is surprising and rewarding to read again the immense ode, the vast laudation, that is the 119^th Psalm. Like many, I used to skip over it: it was long and boring and repetitive, and kept muttering about law and statutes and commandments and testimonies. Gradually, as I spent more time reading Psalms, this one began to get my attention. First I looked up all those words, and realised that while they can, in a pinch, be distinguished, they are in the poetic sense semi-synonyms, and to be taken as such. Then I discovered that the breaking-up of Ps. 119 into 8-line sections was not a quirk of the Vulgate but an original feature, since each section begins with a consecutive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It is, therefore, either a stanzaic poem or an organised collection of short poems around a central theme: the praise of God’s law.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who reminded us Christians that the law, as here seen and praised, is not the law as we tend to imagine it. When a Christian thinks of himself in relation to God’s law, it’s a criminal court he thinks of. He tends to see himself as the accused in the box, invariably Guilty and able to hope at most for mercy and forgiveness. When the Psalmist thinks of himself in relation to God’s law, he sees a civil court, with himself as the plaintiff and “the ungodly” as the defendants. But beneath that level of argument, there is a more moving vision, which shows very clearly in Ps. 119: God’s law is a clearly-traced path which has allowed the poet to emerge from a trackless and lethal desert – imagine the Nefud in Lawrence of Arabia. Finding such a trail saves one’s life.

Reading Ps. 119 in this way is already deeply satisfying and inspiring. But as Christians, we have a further way to read it that is little short of vertiginous. If we come to it after reading both the Gospels and the letters of St Paul, we need to use a new key: for the new version of Judaism that is the faith of the followers of Yeshua Meshiach, the resurrected Meshiach (Christos) does not preach, or even reform, the Law: he is the Law. The Christian does not obey the Law: his true relation to it is what Paul describes: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”(Galatians 2:20)

As we used to say in the Sixties, this blows your mind. But now try to read Ps. 119 in this way – with Christ as the Law, and all His deeds and sayings as the commandments and testimonies etc. In a sense, the whole Psalm becomes an elaboration of, and a commentary on, Paul’s stupendous text. Nothing of the original reading is lost: as Yeshua himself said, the law is not cancelled but accomplished. It’s just that a vast and dizzying new perspective is added, so that the poem becomes even more profound and inspiring. 

Rembrandt: the Risen Christ

A VISITOR FROM EVERYWHERE

His visits are rare. Always wished-for, hoped-for, longed-for, asked-for; and when he comes, there is a sudden sense of more light in the air, of ambient sound becoming a harmony, of one’s own terrestrial weight lessening. How long he stays depends on his welcome, and on the lodging he is given. 

This morning he arrived, unannounced, at the moment I awoke, and in my mind there was the sudden image of the first half of a bridge, arriving from somewhere and touching down just in front of me. And a flooding sense of pure joy. Lightness of being. It had been such a long time since he was last here!

You will have guessed who he is. He has various names: Ruach HaKodesh, Pneuma Hagion, Spiritus Sanctus, the Holy Ghost. It feels impossibly presumptuous, imagining that one is receiving a personal visit from the Third Person of the Trinity; and I am quite prepared to be told, and to believe, that the one who came today is “merely” an angel sent by the Ruach. On the other hand, we are told that we may ask for his presence, and that that is one prayer almost certainly answered; and we even learn that if we manage to prepare a suitable dwelling, he and the other two Persons will come and live there full-time. 

Why is such a thought even possible? Because the God who is the collective name for the Trinity is (as the medieval Liber XXIV philosophorum puts it) “a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”. Because he is both intimate and ubiquitous, holding the Universe in the hollow of his hand and meeting me with absolute love wherever I am and go (Psalm 139). This is conceivable only by learning to unite one’s faith in a Creator with the experience of prayer in one’s inmost closet. It is perfectly and stupendously expressed in the Third Collect for Morning Prayer: “O Lord our heavenly Father, almighty and everlasting God, who has safely brought us to the beginning of this day . . .”

It is at such moments that Theology becomes experience, that Divinity becomes real. Up close and personal. Utterly surprising. Especially if one is not a seasoned mystic, a Benedictine hermit, a San Juan de la Cruz, but an ordinary homme moyen sensuel in a French farmhouse in the Age of Bannon. Surprising, and yet not: completely natural, just also completely festive. 

How to react? I think, by deep down letting go – for the time being, letting him occupy the driving-seat and getting on with the day in a quiet and attentive way, peacefully but minutely attuned to where he turns the wheel. And keeping alive the festivity with an astonished giving of thanks.