Psalm 16—The Light No Night Allays

"I remember nausea and wonder."

Note from Andy

This one took a while to write because of a combination of life events and a poem that transformed a few times before it was all said and done. The good news is that Psalm 16 is now ready and, in the meantime, I also bought a house, wrote a liturgy for the upcoming Every Moment Holy Volume 3, and made a start on the poem for Psalm 18 (the volcano one).

In other news, Psalm 16 marks the 30th psalm of the Darkling Psalter. That is a bit of a milestone as it means we are 1/5 of the way there. Thanks for coming along on the journey so far.

If you are just joining us, the Darkling Psalter is a project to create renditions of the Psalms (creative rewordings based on the original Hebrew), notes, and original poems to pair with each one.

You can catch up with previous posts here: 1, 2, 8, 13, 14, 19, 22, 29, 31, 32, 34, 38, 42, 46, 51, 53, 73, 74, 84, 86, 88, 107, 121, 123, 130, 131, 137, 142, 147, and the Guided Tour.

Rendition of Psalm 16

Keep and tend me, God, for I fled to you for refuge.
You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you. 
Your holy people are my delight.
Those who sell themselves to other gods
Will find that sorrow billows out all around them.

But I will not pour out blood to the darkling gods, 
Or even lift up their names on my lips. 
For the Lord is my lot, my portion, and my cup.
The lines of my life have fallen in pleasant places.
All around me grows a beautiful inheritance.

So I bow myself before the Lord who gives me counsel,
Even in the night he gently instructs me.
He is always at hand, always before me,
So even when I slip, I will not fall,
And even when I fall, I rise.

My heart is glad, my hands are full.
I am happy and secure.
You will not abandon me to death,
Nor let me tumble into the pit. 
No, you teach me the way of life
By walking it with me.
At your side, I am safe and satisfied.
At your right hand, I am at peace forevermore.

Notes on the Rendition

Through the poem below, I am tying Psalm 16 together with the conversion of Paul, a case study in difficult revelations.

As N. T. Wright says in his biography of Paul, zeal would have had a violent aspect in the minds of pious Jews in Paul’s set. For most of his life, Paul probably prayed Psalm 16 and felt that its words were true of him. After all, it proclaims that the “holy people in the land are my delight” and it condemns those who “run after other gods.”

But Psalm 16 is the prayer of someone who is pure at heart and satisfied. Certainly, purity was a value for young Paul, but he was anything but satisfied. When the Jesus movement sprang to life, opposing it with violence seemed to be his first reaction, as his role in the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7 illustrates. Paul’s fellows stoned “the boy” (as he is called in the poem below) while Paul held their clothes and approved.

The next time we see Paul, he is spearheading an escalating program of persecution against the church. It seems that Paul even surpassed his peers in violence and zeal, as Paul himself would say later:

‘I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth… I was so obsessed with persecuting them that I even hunted them down in foreign cities…” Acts 26:9-11

That description is a far cry from the mindset of the writer of Psalm 16, who said

“My heart is glad, my hands are full.
I am happy and secure.”

and

“At your side, I am safe and satisfied.
At your right hand, I am at peace forevermore.”

Then, in Acts 9, Paul had the life-altering experience of meeting God in the form of a blinding light and a voice as he was on the way to Damascus to arrest Christians. I had a professor in seminary who said that all of Paul’s theology and life after his conversion can be traced back to those shattering moments on the road to Damascus when he realized that the one he was persecuting was God himself. As the voice said, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

“Who are you, Lord?” Paul asked.

The reply came: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”

In that moment, Paul’s religion is cracked open and upended as he realizes, in the words of the poem below, that “the one I hated was the one I loved.” All the dominoes of sorrow and conviction begin to topple over inside him as he soon afterward has the humbling, humiliating experience of being healed, helped, and hosted by the very people he had come to Damascus to kill.

I wonder how Paul read Psalm 16 at the end of his life, years after God had forcefully changed his course from producing violence in the name of God to absorbing it? I wonder if, rather than using the psalm to spur his zeal and congratulate himself, he remembered what it took to divert him from his “headlong and plunging” course and laid the emphasis instead on lines like, “you teach me the way of life,” and “even when I slip, I will not fall.”

That is just speculation, but when Paul does quote Psalm 16 in a sermon in Acts 13:35, he is not telling people to keep the law or oppose those who disagree with them, he uses the psalm to talk about the way that Jesus’ resurrection enables the forgiveness of sins, provides a better purity than was available under the law of Moses, and can change the hearts of people with a gospel that they otherwise would “never believe even if someone told them.”

Notes on the Poem

This poem started as a villanelle, but I couldn’t fit enough of the narrative of Paul’s conversion into that form, so it changed into four sonnets with a rhyming couplet at the end of each one.

I am seeing a theme rise in these poems: what one does with the experience of being wrong. What walls do we build against the realization that we are wrong and what does it take to overcome them? What happens inside us when those walls tumble down? Is there awakening? Denial? Villainy? Revelation? Retreat? Collapse?

Elsewhere in the project, the theme appears in Nebuchadnezzar’s violent overthrow in Psalm 2, in the crushed heads of the roses in Psalm 121, in the harrowing lane of Psalm 147, and in the four characters who have their own painful revelations in Psalm 107.

Give the Poem a Title

I’ll title this poem in a couple of days if I don’t hear from you, but I’m leaving the first pick for readers. The naming convention for these poems is that the title must be a line from the poem.

Send your suggestions to andymatthewpatton@gmail.com or leave them in the comments.

Poem for Psalm 16—The Light No Night Allays

“I will show him how much he must suffer...” Acts 9:16

I.

I knew the boy wanted killing.
The more he talked, the more he made 
That foul hash of the words I loved.
We were all screaming by the end.
Men pressed their hands to their ears
And scrabbled in the dirt for stones.
They kicked him along the ground
While I held their clothes, relieved.
And then that mummer's farce—
He raised his eyes and smiled
And called out to my God
As if the sky itself opened.
I told myself I earned your praise.
I saw no light but my skin burned for days. 

II.

I am a Jew of Tarsus. 
I have hoped and studied and prayed
And waited for Messiah.
Your people are my delight.
As to zeal, it has been a knife.
I was headlong and plunging.
I plotted and raged. I wore the regalia of piety.
I knew I was right. I ran 
From town to town those days.
I dragged men from their houses.
I was angry and my head hurt,
But I longed to suffer for God.
He is a consuming fire,
So I gave him all that he required.

III. 

There was a whisper of wings 
And I clattered to the ground,
The pain was not the blow that shook me,
Nor the savage light, nor the violence, 
But the knowledge, sudden and sure
That I was wrong. 
I saw the light no night allays and held
My face to the dirt, blind and silent.
The rocks rattled around me
And lifted from the ground.
The crushed heads of roses slipped from my hands.
My companions gathered me to my feet
But I was revoked and sundered.
I remember nausea and wonder.

IV.

I fell to fever flat out
And sweated in bed for weeks.
I walked outside and nothing was clear.
I could see again but did not know what to do. 
I have flensed his lambs.
The one I hated was the one I loved.
At a stroke, my past broke to bits of glass.
I am in the lanes of longsuffering. 
I never thought my God
Would send a hope so far from me, but
Hidden in the loss was another life
And love itself is thunderous light.
It is longer than I thought and strange.
I say the psalms but the words are changed.

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Photo by Thomas Willmott on Unsplash