There are probably a lot of people who don’t believe in God
but are not quite sure about that. Now that I think about it, I do believe in
God, but I am not quite sure about that. At least I have moments when I
question the depth of my own faith.
When those moments come, I look around to see if there are
other people walking with me. When I am taking the place of a pastor somewhere
and preside at a Sunday Mass in his parish, I feel like I am being carried
along on the backs of the people in the congregation. We’re all in this
together.
Makes me think of a principle of military sociology: when
soldiers are facing death in battle, they are not thinking about the flag or God
or some other noble value. They are thinking about the soldier next to them.
They go where their buddy goes, and they suffer what their buddy suffers, and
maybe they die so that their buddy can live.
The people in the congregation are my buddies.
I have other buddies. They are people who pray psalms.
First of all they are people around the world today who are
praying the same psalms today. We have this system called the “liturgy of the
hours,” which lays out a plan for which psalms should be prayed on which days.
There are men and women in Africa, and Oceania, and South Asia, and Europe, and
South America, and even here in North America who are today using the words of the
same psalms I am using, even though in different languages.
But then there are all the people who lived in earlier times.
Monks and nuns who lived back in the middle ages and in the centuries before
the middle ages. They were using the same words, though again in a different
language from my English.
Aside: I grew up in an era when seminaries
forced their students to learn Latin and Greek. In our case it was six years of
Latin and four years of Greek. I can’t claim that I was comfortable in either
language even after all that time, but the experience made me stubborn enough to
keep my hand on that plough—I would touch base with those languages every so
often. With Greek it was when I was preparing to preach on a New Testament
passage, because the New Testament’s original language was Greek. With Latin,
one time it was when a fellow Quincy University English professor talked me
into taking over his introductory Latin course. He loves Latin, and has a much
better grasp of the language than I have ever had.
Years ago I tried to photo-copy and paste together an English
translation of the psalms with a Greek version of them. That didn’t work—too
much Scotch tape. But now we have the Kindle, and Greek and Latin versions of
the psalms available for download from websites, all for free. So my psalms are
in triplicate: each verse in Greek, followed by Latin, followed by English.
When I pray a psalm in Latin, I think of all the people who
used those exact same words down through the centuries. And the same for
Greek—I think of the early Church “Fathers” like Athanasius and Basil who used
the Greek words. Who knows? Maybe even Jesus knew Greek. Even if he didn’t, St.
Paul certainly did.
I was told in a world religions course in grad school that
Muslims are urged to read and speak the Q’uran in Arabic, that only by doing that
can they appreciate what the Prophet wrote.
Conclusion to the aside: We could do worse than urge people
of faith to learn Latin and Greek so that they will be able to have a richer
understanding of the psalms.
But back to the lukewarm atheist.
The psalms are an education about God. Every verse tells me
something about God. Maybe they could teach the lukewarm atheist too.
For example, over and over in the psalms two nouns occur: “ἔλεος
(eleos)” and “ἀλήθεια
(alethia)” in Greek, “misericordia” and “veritas” in Latin. But these are translations of the original
Hebrew: “ḥesed” and “ˁĕmûnâ.”
“ḥesed” can be translated “steadfast love.”
“ˁĕmûnâ” means “faithfulness.” The
two attributes of God that the psalms keep talking about are steadfast love and
faithfulness.
Look, for example, at the Latin of the shortest psalm in the
psalter, Psalm 117:
Laudate
Dominum, omnes gentes;
laudate
eum, omnes populi.
Praise!
Give glory
to God!
Nations,
peoples,
give glory!
Quoniam
confirmata est super nos misericordia
ejus,
et
veritas Domini manet in
æternum.
Strong
the love embracing
us. -
Faithful
the Lord
forever.
Even after ten years of praying the psalms in Latin and many
more years of praying them in English, I never noticed how often the two terms
were paired. It was only after I kept seeing the pair popping up again and
again in both Greek and Latin that I noticed the frequency.
That’s a nice way to describe God, don’t you think? God is
steadfast love and faithfulness.
The psalms describe God with ears, and eyes, and hands, and
an outstretched arm. God is jealous—but if you have a steadfast love for
someone, and you see someone else horning in on that love, won’t you get angry?
The jealousy grows out of love. Unfortunately, the jealousy led to an
exaggerated focus on God’s punishing hand, an exaggeration nicely fitting into
authority figures’ desire to make people behave. It took Jesus to strip away
the focus on punishment and get back to the steadfast love character of God.
Yes, the psalms have a lot of problematic passages. The
people who composed some of them didn’t know God very well, and the people who
copied the originals sometimes botched the copying and nobody has ever been
able to figure out what they were supposed to mean. But we are a human family,
and we botch things and misunderstand God. The psalms teach us that too.
Conclusion.
The psalms are this lukewarm theist’s school of Godness.
Every day I bathe in the centuries of words read, spoken, and chanted, about
God. I still don’t know God very well. But it’s good to know that I can keep
learning, with guidance from 150 sets of ancient words.
They used to say “In
David, Christus.” In the songs supposedly composed by David, you can find
Jesus Christ. In the words of those old poems, we can find the Word made flesh.
What more do we need?
