Retreat Address on the Psalms 1 - Prayer and the Praises of God (Psalm 65)

I want this week to reflect with you on the psalms. You don’t need me to tell you that the psalms are at the heart of the Opus Dei as St Benedict conceived it in his Rule. In the medieval cathedrals like Durham where I served until recently, we tried to be faithful to the way the Rule has influenced and shaped Anglican liturgy by reciting in full the monthly cycle of psalms in the Book of Common Prayer, said in the morning, sung in the evening. It was not a burden but a joy to do this. It's what I miss most in retirement. I used to tell choristers that as a matter of musicianship, if they could sing the psalms, they could sing anything. 

Well, if you can pray the psalms, you can pray anything, anytime, anywhere. The value to us at Durham was not only to restore the balance of the divine office by giving proper honour to the psalms. It also exposed us to their vast emotional and spiritual range, from despair to thankfulness, from sorrow to hope, and from resignation to acceptance, confidence and joy. And it incorporated us into the story of a faith community that has called on the God of Israel since he first called Abraham to make his journey of faith so that all the world might find blessing. 

What I intend to offer is a series of meditations on one of each day’s morning psalms in a way that I hope explores their potential to touch the experience of all of us. The morning psalm cycle of Week 3 includes representatives of most of the types of psalm that form critics have recognised. But my concern is not so much the study of the psalms as the way we pray them. And in this, I am not only thinking of the church’s prayer but the experience of communities and individuals more widely. And I also want to remind us from time to time that a very ancient way of construing them is to imagine them placed on the lips of Jesus as his own vade mecum in prayer, as I am sure we can confidently say they were throughout his life. 

********

So let me begin with one of those set for today, Psalm 65. The theme is prayer and doxology, prayer and the praise of God. 

The psalm is a glowing song of harvest: the good earth and the fecundity of the land. It seems to belong to the annual festival that was probably celebrated in the autumn. It would have embraced the renewal of the seasonal cycle, the renewal of the covenant and the renewal of the people. All of Israel’s life is gathered up in psalms like this: life celebrated and offered, and the author of life worshiped and adored. 

This is why the psalm begins, not with the land and its harvest but with the temple. For it was seen as the focus of the people’s prayer for wellbeing.  Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the temple specifically mentions threats to the land’s fertility as one of the reasons why Israel would pray ‘towards this place’. In that prayer, threats such as famine, blight or the failure of the rains are seen as grounds for which the people should acknowledge their sin and seek forgiveness.  In the psalm, the themes of God’s goodness and a penitent people’s forgiveness are once again linked together: when deeds of iniquity overwhelm us, you forgive our transgressions …Happy are those whom you choose and bring near to live in your courts (3-4). Perhaps Solomon’s prayer is specifically being recalled here.  

The emphasis on Zion must not mislead us as to the true scope of this Psalm. Here, Zion is seen not only as the focus of the nation’s prayer, but as the symbolic centre of the whole world.  To you all flesh shall come (2).  Like the prophets of the exile and afterwards, this psalmist believes that Zion is where “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together”.  This universal vision is carried through the next section where the addresses God as the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas (5), for this is the Creator who established the world on its foundations and put the chaotic waters in their place (6-7).  So it is not only Israel but those who live at earth’s farthest bounds who are awed by your signs (8).  

All this prepares the way for the concluding section in which harvest is celebrated as the abundant proof of God’s everlasting care for the human race (9ff.).  The logic of this Psalm is simple: if God demonstrated his power and goodness by creating the world, the harvest demonstrates how his work of creation continues into the present.  Thou visitest the earth and blessest it; thou makest it very plenteous… Thou crownest the year with thy goodness: and thy clouds drop fatness (9, 11 BCP).  I’ve quoted the Prayer Book version because I have fond memories of singing those words as a chorister in the anthem by Maurice Green. And while there is no doubt a special blessing implied here for the Israelites who saw their land as a divinely given inheritance, the invitation to praise God is not limited to the covenant people.  Nothing less than the whole of creation is the recipient of God’s overflowing goodness, so much so that even the natural world finds itself joining in the psalmist’s song of praise: the valleys also stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing (13 BCP).

********

Let me offer some reflections on the spirituality of this bright, cheerful psalm. 

First, there is the insight that all of life must be lived out of gratitude and praise. Earlier this month I was conducting the ordinands’ retreat in Lincoln Diocese. We reflected together on each of the five stanzas of Bishop John Cosin’s version of the medieval hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, “Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire”. The fifth verse is the doxology: praise to thy eternal merit, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So I gave an address on how we need to live doxologically in life and in ministry, how we need to construe our entire existence as the offering of praise to the Holy Trinity, how all of life is, in the most profound sense, eucharistic. 

Te decet hymnus, Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion. The key word is the first one, praise. In Hebrew it’s tehillah. I mention that because the entire book of psalms has that same word as its title in the Hebrew Canon where it is called the book of “Praises”, tehillim. That is highly significant when we consider that the majority of psalms are not hymns or praises so much as laments. Nevertheless, the canonists seem to be saying, in lament as in celebration, in longing as in thankfulness, praise must be the ground of our prayer. All of life, whether it is lived in a major or minor key or somewhere in between, must be doxology. “I will bless the Lord at all times.” 

And the praise of God is the source of good order in our lives as communities and as people. Happy are those whom you choose and bring near to live in your courts. We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, your holy temple. I want to come back to the “happiness” sayings in the Psalms later in the week. But here, we see how happiness is linked to being near the sanctuary, close to its rhythms of prayer, participating in its common discipline of life together. We shouldn’t imagine that the Jerusalem temple was altogether like this chapel of the Community of the Resurrection. But in terms of the golden spiritual thread that runs through our tradition from antiquity to modernity, I am sure we should make this link. 

What is worth noticing is how the psalm suddenly switches – lurches you could say - from the goodness of your house, your holy temple to the awesome acts of God. What is striking is how this central section is dominated by the images of power subduing a violent, chaotic universe. God established the mountains out of the tumultuous convulsions of rock and fire. He silenced the roaring of the seas, the roaring of the waves, that ancient symbol of demonic chaos that God needed to subdue at creation and constrain within their proper bounds. Even the tumult of the peoples “furiously raging together” as Psalm 2 puts it, is subject to God’s control. When he acts, the consequence is that order. Time is given back its proper shape. You make the gateways of the morning and evening shout for joy. 

I’m saying that when we praise God and learn to live doxologically, it orders our existence, gives shape to our wayward lives, creates disciplines and boundaries for the chaotic waters that represent our human chaos and disorder. In particular, this psalm, beginning and ending with praise and thanksgiving in such a way as to “contain” the confusion in between, illustrates how God’s praise needs to envelop life like a literary inclusio. Rightly to order our lives is not so much a matter of strenuous effort (which would be Pelagianism) but of giving ourselves up to the praise and worship of our Creator. The eucharistic life, I believe, is the well-shaped, properly-ordered life because it knows and acknowledges the ground of its own being. In a psalm later this week, I’m going to mention the sin of envy and how we should deal with it. My answer will be: by learning how to be thankful, how to praise God. Doxology is the only way. 

Who am I to tell you this as a community living the religious life? You of all people know how the daily rhythms of holy eucharist and divine office express your commitment to a rule that is designed to preserve good spiritual order and keeps chaos in its place. You recite the Gloria a score of times each day at the opening of each office and at the end of the psalms and canticles. The symbolism of this simple act speaks powerfully to me as a secular priest for whom the divine office has always been at the centre of my spiritual life as an adult. Pascal said: if we can only keep on walking, everything will be all right. Let me nuance that by saying “walking doxologically”, walking in the praise of God, walking eucharistically, walking for his glory. That is our vocation in both religious and secular life. And if we follow it as best we can, we are protected from spiritual chaos and harm, and everything will be all right. 

And then, reverence for God must inevitably be connected to reverence for life. The connection between the sanctuary and the world is fundamental to authentic spirituality. We’ve seen how the psalm moves seamlessly between the temple and the earth, between the sacred space of the cult and the sacred space of all creation. There is a beautiful spiritual transparency in this psalm, how it progresses from the praise that is offered in the holy place to the memory of God’s mighty acts in creating the heavens and the earth; and then to his sustaining of the created world into the present experience of the worshipper. In other words, as he was in the beginning, so he is now, abundantly demonstrated in a good harvest: the watered earth, the fields and meadows dancing with joy, the year crowned with God’s bounty.

This is to say, that when worship and life are connected as doxology, they will also be connected as ecology. There is an ecology of the spirit, an ecology of human society, and an ecology of nature. The Hebrew and Christian scriptures have always had a healthy understanding of the sacred-and-secular distinction: not that it is wrong in itself (as some claim rather too hastily) but that it is provisional. It must always be understood in the larger context of affirming that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it” as the opening verse of Psalm 24 puts it, a rite of entry into the sanctuary that makes the same connection as today’s psalm between liturgy and the created order. 

So whether the psalm is meant as an affirmation or a prayer, we are meant to grasp the complete commitment God has to the welfare and flourishing of the world he has made. You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it. His involvement with the earth is no less than humanity’s: the harvest is both God’s and ours. There is therefore a deep collaboration implied in these concluding verses, a divine and human synergy that enables the land to realise its potential and give of its best, not just so that living things can enjoy them but as an end in itself, realising the purpose for which it was made, to be both “beautiful and useful” as William Morris might have said. 

Jewish and Christian spirituality have always emphasised the goodness of creation. But in our own times this has become not only an honouring of the Creator but an urgent imperative to this generation and those who follow us. As we know, the natural world and the human family as part of it are more fragile than our predecessors had imagined. The threats we ourselves pose to our planet are more obvious today than ever before as we are beginning to see how climate change will inevitably have far-reaching consequences for the delicate ecology of our island home. The imperative is both to live more ethically and to conserve what we have inherited so that our children and grandchildren can enjoy the fruits of the earth as well as us.

I confess to being pessimistic about our ability as nations and peoples to turn round our selfish propensity to exploit nature while there is still time. I read a report in the paper last week that drew attention to how many environmental activists are murdered in Latin America because they get in the way of making lucrative gains out of rivers and rainforests. It's not just the environment but human life itself that is written off as cheap or of no value. And I fear for a future when the habitable world contracts to the point where major conflict becomes almost inevitable. Here is where we people of faith need to see the world in the context of what is even larger, God’s creative love and providential care. Our psalm ought to provoke us into getting our perspectives adjusted so that we see clearly not only how precious our world is, but how much it is at risk, how we must urgently change our ways and encourage others to change theirs so that we place at the heart of our human ecology a true and lasting reverence for life.

For us as disciples, that would be to put hope and imagination back into the centre of our prayer in such a way as to banish despair by committing us to act for the good of the planet and the glory of God. I imagine Jesus would have had psalms of blessing like this on his lips each day, for in him, we might say, we see doxology made flesh, articulating with and on behalf of the world its instinct to be true to itself and respond to God’s goodness. So like him, in the spirit of our psalm, we want to align ourselves with God’s wise and loving purposes for the creation. We do this, says the psalm, by keeping alive in ourselves our capacity to be thankful for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, but above all (Christians go on to say) for the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ.

So in our meditations today, I invite us to reflect on living eucharistically to the praise of God, and on how doxology at the centre of life transforms our prayer, our living, and our endeavours to work for a more just, more sustainable, more Christ-like world.

A Sermon on the Farne

Yesterday I went with the choristers to the Farne Islands and then to Holy Island. We walked in the steps of the saints to visit the sources of northern English Christianity. If you love Cuthbert as northern people do, then you want to discover the places he loved too. If you had asked him where especially, he would have said: go to the Farne. Imbibe the spirit of that remote place where the North Sea’s cold slatey waters beat against the whin sill rocks, where guillemots, puffins and terns have their island home under the wide Northumberland sky. Who knows where the name comes from? – an old British word farran meaning ‘land’, or faran meaning a traveller, or that the island group was thought to resemble a fern in shape?

 

Bede says that the Farne ‘is an island far out to sea’; that it was a ‘remote battlefield’, haunted by demons and that Cuthbert was the first person brave enough to live there alone; that he built himself a ‘city’, which is how hermits talked about their cells, consisting of a circular wall cut out of the rock, a shelter to live in and an oratory to pray in. He prayed hard, dug a pit and lo, God turned the solid rock into a standing water whose supply never failed. He built a lodge for guests and cultivated the meagre soil whose first harvest was a good barley crop. When the birds set about devouring it, he told them off. ‘Why are you eating crops you did not yourselves grow? If God has said you can, so be it. If not, be off with you and stop damaging other people’s property.’ Here Cuthbert spent the last part of his life, dying there on 20 March 687. The islands passed to Durham Cathedral Priory which kept a cell of two monks there. Prior Castell built a pele tower while the chapel is probably on the site of Cuthbert’s oratory. Surprisingly, the Farnes remained the Cathedral’s property until the nineteenth century.

 

I have preached often on our northern saints. They are among our prized gospel texts here in North East England. I put it that way because when the gospel is written on the hearts and lives of men, women and children, it comes alive in a unique way. ‘They being dead yet speak’ says our miners’ banner in the south transept, a quotation from the letter to the Hebrews. The writer wants to inspire his readers to courage in following Jesus, so he lists some of the great heroes of faith in the Hebrew Bible and says: live like them; believe like them, hope like them. We read the passage in that chapel: ‘seeing we are surrounded by a great crowd of witnesses, let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfector of our faith’.

 

But as I put it in my book Landscapes of Faith, holy people are inseparable from the locations they populated. The places where they lived and walked and preached and prayed have become sacred sites where pilgrims travel to remember how the saints did the work of God and bequeathed their spirit of faith and hope to those who came after them. So places become gospel texts too. Where the Spirit touches the earth, a sacred geography is established, a way of reading ‘place’ in terms of its influence on human beings and their influence on it, and how people of faith have responded to God’s presence in particular places. This place, Durham Cathedral, is a great example: we are sitting within sacred geography. This Cathedral and the city that grew around it, what the monks called an English Zion, only exist at all because of the monks who brought St Cuthbert’s body here a thousand years ago and created a spiritual legacy that has shaped lives ever since.

 

The Farne is another of these places. So let me ask: what is the gospel written into the old eternal rocks and the deep salt sea that swirls round them? Among many words I hear there is one about creaturehood. I mean that these remarkable islands tell me something important about the natural world and how I must try to find my place within God’s creation. I doubt that this has much to do with the conventional response of saying how beautiful they are. That would not have impressed Cuthbert who built his city wall high enough to stop him being distracted by his surroundings. Moreover, when the sea is stirred and the wind is up and the sky is like gunmetal, their gaunt isolation seems to seize hold of you, and the sense of exposure can be threatening. The thousands of birds wheeling round a vast sky and nesting precariously on the basalt sea-stacks are one of the awesome sights of England; but Cuthbert knew they were not always comfortable bed-fellows. 

Yet this numinous quality of nature, ravishing or grim, grasps you. It puts you in your place, reminds you of your own smallness in the face of what can’t ever be tamed. We learn that we are mortals and not gods. The Farne is one of those places where our vision is brought back into focus, where we see what we always were and are, fashioned by our Creator and a part of the same chain of being as the islands, the rocks, the birds and the sea. How important that corrective is for our whole existence as a human race capable of destroying the planet given to us as our home. It keeps us humble to recognise that we must act with courtesy towards all living things, as Mother Julian says, not so much out of enlightened self-interest, as because reverencing God’s world is part of reverencing him for himself. To honour his handiwork in sky and earth and sea ought to teach us to honour one another made as his image charged with the care and stewardship of what he has made.

 

Reverence for God and courtesy for his fellow beings lay at the heart of Cuthbert’s life on the Farne. He went there, as Bede says, to find solitude and devote himself to prayer. Bede is clear that this was not an act of withdrawal for the sake of gazing out on beautiful sunsets and thinking beautiful thoughts. The hermit saints looked for fierce landscapes where they would not be distracted from doing God’s work of prayer. Cuthbert knew he must focus on this daunting spiritual ordeal, just as Jesus did in the desert. The sea journey our monks frequently made across the sound from Holy Island to the Farne were often difficult under the fierce blasts of wind that rush down from Cheviot. The voyage was its own metaphor of arduous spiritual endeavour. When you step on to the Farne, you are reminded how demanding it is to take up your cross to follow Christ.

 

Yet we find this tough spirituality sits well with reverence for nature. The solitaries have always been strangely companionable. It is not that they are reclusive; rather that they perceive their friends - humans or birds, animals, plants or rocks - as also belonging to a world that is charged with the grandeur of God. For where our inner noise begins to be stilled, we become open to God in new ways, more responsive to our fellow-travellers and the environments we share with them. So while this Cuthbert vocation is not for most of us all of the time, it could be for all of us some of the time. I’m thinking of how important it is for health of mind and body as well as the soul to find regular times and spaces to be still and alone and prayerful. Whether it is for minutes or hours or days, we can embark on journeys large or small for the sake of travelling more deeply into God and into our own selves. As people of faith, it’s natural to want to imitate Cuthbert in seeking places that would nourish the spirit, as Jesus himself often did when he went up the mountain or in the wilderness to wrestle and pray. In the words of a desert father, ‘go into your cell, and your cell will teach you everything’. So go wherever your soul finds it can drink deep of the Spirit of the living God whose risen Son shows us the Father, and as our way, our truth and our life, looks for human hearts in which to make a home.

Back to Booths!

When you are embarking on an ambitious building project, it consumes a great deal of your time and energies, as we know well here at the Cathedral. Nehemiah, governor of Judah, has set himself the task of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, ruinous since the Babylonian invasions over a century before. A man of energetic character who brooks no opposition, he achieves this task despite the Machiavellian tactics of his opponents. They allege that this huge act of reconstruction is to cover up a conspiracy to rebel against the Persian empire.  Why build walls unless your intention is to declare independence?

If this were all there was to the story, it would hardly be worth telling. But the next part of the book shows that a deeper purpose lies behind it.  When the wall is finished, and families have settled into their homes, a great assembly is convened. The people tell Ezra the priest to bring out the book of the law and read from it. For a whole morning he reads aloud at a ceremony marked by both tears of joy and shouts of thankfulness: sorrow for the years they have been alienated from this torah, God’s instruction for sound and healthy living; thankfulness to have their covenant with God given back to them. And they see how the renewal of buildings, temples, walls, houses is a symbol of something deeper: the renewal of their vocation and resolve to live purposefully in obedience to God’s rule.

Nehemiah sees that the ancient book requires them to do something specific to mark their obedience. It’s the autumn, the season of harvest. Nehemiah realises that according to the law, a long-neglected festival needs to be reinstated.  So he instructs everyone to go out into the fields, gather branches of whatever trees they can find, and construct leafy booths in the open air: on their housetops or in streets and courts and public squares, even in the temple precincts. Then they are to go and live in them for a week. All this the people do. The text goes out of its way to say that they did it gladly: ‘there was very great rejoicing’.

Here’s an odd thing: to celebrate the end of a building project not by occupying the newly created buildings but by deliberately quitting them to live outside. Clearly, the people understood what this meant because the text doesn’t explain why it was important, only that it was part of being thankful. We have to look back into the torah, the books of the law, to understand the significance of the festival of Booths, If there are gaps in the law-codes, we shall need to use our imaginations a little. Here is how I read it.

First, the feast was as an act of celebration. How better to mark the ingathering of the harvest than going out to live in the very fields where you have sweated and toiled all summer to garner the fruits of the earth? It is God’s harvest, but it is also the work of human hands. There is something endearing about this command to go out and be at home in the open air. It is our natural environment, a memory of how once upon a time a man and a woman lived without fear or shame in a garden where the Lord God walked and enjoyed the company of his human friends. What we love about Cuthbert and Francis is that they were so much at home in the natural world.

By contrast, we see around us ever more evidence of how alienated we have become from good earth, so estranged from it that we can contemplate the planet burning because of our contempt for the environment. Tabernacles reminds us how our own health and the earth’s renewal depend on our learning to reconnect with the natural order, learn to treat all things living with courtesy, ‘discover our place in God’s creation’ as the Cathedral’s purpose statement puts it. It looks forward to the day when nature and humanity are reconciled and, in Isaiah’s vision, the wolf dwells with the lamb, the child plays over the hole of the asp, and nothing hurts or destroys in all God’s holy mountain, for the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Second, this exercise in al fresco living was meant to teach the Jews something important about dependence. It’s precisely at the time solid structures are completed that Nehemiah says: don’t depend on these beautiful stones and beautiful buildings. Depend only on God. Let your faith in him be re-energised by having to live for a while without the securities you are getting used to again. For this was precisely how your ancestors lived in days of old: ‘a wandering Aramean was my father’ says one of Israel’s oldest creeds: nomads and fugitives in the barren wilderness for all those years they trekked, often despondently, towards the land of promise.

Yet despite their obduracy and lack of hope, God did not forget the Hebrews but prepared a table in the wilderness for them, as Ezra puts it in his magnificent covenant-making speech in the next chapter. Tabernacles was a way of going back to that story, rekindling the memory of far-off days when the Hebrews had no houses, no temple, no abiding city. ‘You shall dwell in booths seven days, so that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them up out of the land of Egypt.’ It reminded them how life’s changes and chances threw them on the mercy of the covenant. It told them not to vest ultimate security in anything they could see or touch. It threw them on the mercy and goodness of God. We no doubt expect to learn this lesson in other ways. But learn it we must, if faith means anything.

There is a third theme running through this celebration. How often does the torah instil the habit of being generous and compassionate towards the wanderer and stranger, the outcaste, the disadvantaged, the poor. The more prosperous and successful you become, the easier it is not simply to forget those who need your help, but actively to choose not to remember them. The feast of Booths is a kind of enforced homelessness, having to live in temporary accommodation, discover what it is like to live in the cold and the wet and the dark. When people with a social conscience decide to live for a week on unemployment benefit, perhaps sleeping rough in parks or doorways, it’s easy to disparage this as the token gesture of the comfortably off: acting a part rather than truly taking part.

But this is what Tabernacles calls the people to do. I imagine that it is physically and emotionally
costly to live in a booth for a week. I have never done it. I like to think the Jews of Nehemiah’s day discovered as we can that by taking up roles and acting out rituals, their meanings become more real, are understood in new ways. That leads to the transformation of attitudes and perspectives, in this case a deeper sympathy with and compassion for those for whom living in streets and squares and the open country is not a matter of joy and will not come to an end next week.

The renewal of a people’s mind and heart is what Nehemiah wanted to achieve. He knew that building the walls was the easy part. Much harder to rebuild a community on the values of justice, loving-kindness and truth. This great communal celebration of an ancient festival was only the beginning. But it sowed the seeds of the future when, under pressure and at times of terrible persecution, Judaism covenant would remain steadfast to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who had called them into this privileged life and promised that in their seed all the peoples of the world would bless themselves. In Jesus, Christians believe that promise to be coming true. This is why we pray as he taught us, ‘thy kingdom come’, and look with eager longing for the day of God when the rich promises foreshadowed in one of the old pilgrim feasts become nothing less than a new heaven and new earth.


Durham Cathedral, 20 October 2013 (Nehemiah 8. 9-end)