I first encountered the 130th Psalm when I took a class entitled Exile & Pilgrimage at Kenyon College.  Don Rogan, my professor, who later became my friend and mentor, had us read Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, the desperate letter to his lover that he wrote while imprisoned for sodomy.  Wilde’s small book takes its name from the Latin title of the psalm.  It was one of the best things I read that year, or maybe any year, of college.

The 130th Psalm is one of the Psalms of Ascent, the group of psalms that Jews sang while on pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem.  These fifteen psalms (120-134) might be expected to be praise songs, since the people singing them were on their way to worship God.  But they’re not.  In these psalms, the people laid bear their souls – all of the pain they felt towards each other, all of the grievances, all of the disappointments.  In our culture, we rarely sing sad songs together, let alone songs that are full of complaints against our neighbors.  I find it odd to think of a group of pilgrims walking together and expressing the struggles of their communities in song.  But that’s what they did.

Of the fifteen Psalms of Ascent, the 130th is my favorite, in part thanks to Oscar Wilde, but also because I find it the most intense, the most raw.  I hope that the piece I made reflects that rawness.

Here’s Nan Merrill’s transliteration of the psalm:

Psalm 130

Out of the depths I cry to You!
In your Mercy, hear my voice!
May you be attentive to the
voice of my supplications!

If You should number the times we
stray from You, O Beloved,
who could face You?
Yet You are ever-ready to forgive,
that we might be healed.

I wait for You, my soul waits,
for in your Love I would live;
My soul awaits the Beloved
as one awaits the birth
of a child, or
as one awaits the fulfillment
of their destiny.

O sons and daughters of the Light,
welcome the Heart of your heart!
Then you will climb the Sacred
Mountain of Truth;
You will know mercy and love
in abundance.
Then will your transgressions be
forgiven; and you will know
the Oneness of All.

From Psalms for Praying © 2007 Nan C. Merrill, Continuum International Publishing Group, www.PsalmsForPraying.com

When I was in my early thirties and recently ordained, I would meet retired priests at clergy conferences and they would tell me all of the things that they didn’t really believe. My sense was that they had never believed in the virgin birth or in substitutionary atonement, or hadn’t believed in those things for a long time, but they’d spent their lives proclaiming such doctrine from the pulpit anyway. It was only in retirement that they felt free to be honest. Before that, they’d felt a responsibility for the tradition that they had been ordained into, and they weren’t going to undermine that tradition, regardless of what they personally thought. I had some sympathy for these men (and they were all men), while at the same time resolving not to be like them. Back then, it was an easy resolution, because I was very orthodox and could honestly say that I did believe in the virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, and all the rest. And many of their objections felt like they came out of mid-20th century modernism, something that I, as a good post-modernist, had very little sympathy for.

I’m no longer so certain in my beliefs. My mother’s death has sent me wandering through an agnostic wilderness during the last ten months. I’ve been praying less, and when I do pray, I’m not really sure who I’m talking to. Yet, like many other people, I still consider myself a Christian. I don’t feel that my Christian identity is based in doctrine. But if it isn’t, what is it based in? An easy answer would be that it’s based in practice – I’m a Christian because I go to church and sometimes pray, and occasionally try to do good works in the world. But if practice is the standard, then I have to admit that, in this mourning season of my life, I’m not a very good Christian.

The one thing I continue to do with great regularity, that I can’t seem to stop doing, is question. I sit with friends over lunch and have long, rambling conversations about God. In this moment, I’m not a Christian because I accept the Christian answers, but because I can’t stop asking the Christian questions.

So what are the Christian questions? There are a great many, and I have only a partial list in my mind. But these are the questions that are most salient to me right now:

• Is life more powerful than death? Is death real?
• How do we reconcile suffering with joy?
• How do we become a beautiful community, one that honors people’s weaknesses as well as their strengths?
• What does it mean to be a disciple?
• Should our emphasis be on imitating Jesus or loving Jesus?
• Does God intervene in our lives?
• What roles should joy and playfulness play in our faith lives?
• How do we survive the absence of God as experienced on the cross and experienced in our own lives?
• What is the best way to practice love of neighbor?
• Is the body good or bad? Is sex good or bad?

I have no answers to these questions, but I want to ask them in the company of people who have spent a long time thinking and arguing about them. So I continue to go back to the places where these questions are raised, argued about, and left unresolved. Scripture is one such place, as is tradition, and history, and the current church. I’m not certain if this kind of questioning can really be called faith, but if belief simply means giving your heart to something, I’ve given my heart to these, and many more, questions. I believe in them.

Birth has always been perilous. For most of our history, conceiving meant reconciling oneself with the possibility of death, even in the act of bringing forth new life. Death and life sat very close together on the birthing bed. Midwives, or wise women, would accompany women in labor into that liminal space between life and death, and would guide them through it with their rituals and plant lore and coaxing hands. They have always been the ones who ensured the human future.

The midwives in Exodus have names, Shiphrah and Puah. Pharaoh is known only by his position, not by his name. His dominance would suppress life and bring about death. He is the opposite of a midwife. When the midwives oppose him, it is life opposing death, the named and specific opposing the general and indifferent.

The spiritual life is about putting away the old and welcoming the new. It is about coming through death into new life. It is about discovering ourselves – finding our true names. And it is about standing with God in opposition to dominance and indifference. This is a journey we undertake many times. Again and again, old selves die so that new selves can be born. It is always perilous. And it is when we are faced with this peril that we might cry out for a midwife. We might hope for someone wise to come and aid us with rituals and lore and kindness.

What has died in you?  Do you feel the empty spaces where the dead thing used to be?

What has been trying to be born in you?  Are you struggling with a new birth of self?

Who are the midwives in your life right now?  Who is helping you?

 

This year I will be joining my friends in the Diocese of Southern Ohio as we read the Book of Exodus together. Preparing for this, I’ve found myself dipping into Jewish midrash, especially the Shemot Rabbah, which, according to sefaria.org was composed in 1200 CE in Talmudic Israel/Babylon. I’m honestly not sure what that means. Was in composed in two places? Sefaria provides the text, but not much information about it, and I haven’t found more online. But while reading through it, I was struck by a beautiful story about the Hebrew women giving birth, a magical scene that has the logic and poetry of a fairy tale. I took some liberties in turning it into a poem. If you would like to read the original, you can find it on Sefaria at this address. Here’s my poem:

When the Israelite women conceived
they gave birth under apple trees,
where, loved by the divine, light woke them.

Angels came and cleansed them,
with water bright with apple seeds,
and white blossoms, softly fallen, were their altar.

When the Egyptian masters learned
of these birth rites of the chosen
they came into the apple groves with long knives to kill them.

But angels made the earth a womb,
and placed the children in it, and oxen
plowed the sheltering ground, ensuring it was innocent.

When the killers went away again the children,
born like grass again, rose from mud and bracken,
a generation that peeled the eye, and saw the red sea broken.

Now bring us light and empty us, and bury us like seeds
protect us in our innocence with love beneath the apple trees,
and when we wake from death again, ensure that we can see.