Psalm Sunday: God-craft on Exhibit

Psalm Sunday: God-craft on Exhibit

9/13/15
Chris Breslin
Psalm 19

Instructions for living a life.

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

–Mary Oliver

“It is distinctively human to bring praise to conscious expression in voice, but the creatures remind us that this distinctively human form of praise is worthless unless, like them, we live our whole lives to the glory of God.” –Richard Bauckham

 

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made

sing his being simply by being

the thing it is:

stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why

 

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,

means a storm of peace.

Think of the atoms inside the stone.

Think of the man who sits alone

trying to will himself into the stillness where

 

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made

there is given one shade

shaped exactly to the thing itself:

under the tree a darker tree;

under the man the only man to see

 

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made

the things that bring him near,

made the mind that makes him go.

A part of what man knows,

apart from what man knows,

 

God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.

-Christian Wiman

 

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” –Thomas Merton

 

Further Psalms Reading

The Book of Psalms: A Translation by Robert Alter

The Bible & Ecology by Richard Bauckham

Psalms: the Prayerbook of the Bible by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Seeing the Psalms by William Brown

Praying the Psalms by Walter Brueggemann

Reflections on the Psalms by C.S. Lewis

Praying the Psalms by Thomas Merton

A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson

Praying With the Psalms by Eugene Peterson

The Case for the Psalms by N.T. Wright

Scripture References

Romans 8:11

1 Samuel 14

Ezekiel 3:1-3

Revelation 10:8-10

John 1:14

Colossians 1:19-20

Colossians 1:27

Ephesians 2:22

Matthew 18:2-4

Matthew 5:25-34

Luke 19:40

 

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