Psalm 53—Two Coins For The Ferryman
The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
[Note: I am unable to record this psalm and put it to music right now, but I will circle back and add it to the podcast soon. I wanted to get the text out sooner rather than later.]
Rendition
The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
They have done horrors of injustice; they are corrupt.
There is not one who builds up and multiplies
The rich goodness God gave the world.
God looks down from the heavenly realm
On the children of humanity
To see whether there are any who are wise,
Who seek after God.
They have all fallen away;
Together they have become corrupt.
There is none who does good,
Not even one.
Do those who fashion evil instead of good know nothing?
They devour my people as they devour bread.
They do not call out to God.
They are in terror where there is none to fear.
They are in flight when none pursue.
God scatters the bones of those
Who set themselves against you.
They are put to shame, for God rejects them.
Who will bring the gift of salvation from Zion?
When God restores the captives,
Let Jacob rejoice. Let Israel be glad.
Notes on the Rendition
Note #1: What does it mean to “make tov”?
In the first chapter of Genesis, God declares his creation “good” over and over again. The word for “good” is tov. Tov means more than the simple English word “good” can contain because it evokes the fullness of God’s goodness—the true goodness behind every good thing.
When God makes humans, he tells them to be fruitful and multiply, spreading the peace and flourishing of the garden throughout his new creation. The tov of Eden was supposed to be contagious. Just as a gardener might expand the order and goodness of a garden plot into the neighboring wild woodland, humanity is supposed to spread the tov that still suffuses creation everywhere we go.
Psalm 53 is saying that no one is actually doing that. Instead, humans have focused their attention on bringing forth, building up, and spreading injustice and corruption. The first line of the psalm ties this abnegation of humanity’s calling to its loss of God: "The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’’’
The best we can manage today is to create pockets where the rampant corruption of the Fall is kept in check and God’s tov is husbanded in the small circles of regeneration the New Testament calls the kingdom of God. The circles of redemption are the beachhead of God’s goodness pressing into his creation gone wild.
Note #2: The Serpent’s Bargain Gone Awry
ESV 53:2—”God looks down from the heavenly realm
On the children of humanity
To see whether there are any who are wise,
Who seek after God.”
There is an irony in verse 2. God is looking down from the heavenly realm to see (raah) if there is anyone who is wise, but finds none. The word for “wise” is sakhal. The first occurrence of sakhal is in Genesis 3 during the Serpent’s temptation of Adam and Eve. Eve, like God in Psalm 53, sees (raah) that the food the Serpent is offering is useful for making one wise (sakhal).
So there is something clever going on in Psalm 53. Long ago, humanity forsook God’s way, turning instead to their own way in pursuit of the Serpent’s bargain: “Go against God and you will become wise (sakhal).” But now, in Psalm 53, God is searching for anyone in whom that dark promise has born fruit and he can find no one. Has the Serpent’s promise made anyone wise? No, not even one. Instead of becoming wise—becoming like God—humanity, like overripe fruit have become corrupt. The Psalm is pointing out that sad reality and lamenting it (and pointing us back to the story that makes sense of it all).
Note #3: Jesus in Psalm 53
In terms of the whole Bible, the line “there is no one who does good, not even one” looks both backward and forward in the Old and New Testaments.
It looks backward to Genesis 18 when Abraham intercedes with the Lord as the angels are on their way to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham asks, “Will you sweep away the righteous along with the wicked?” He then proceeds to bargain God down to agreeing to spare the cities if there are 50 righteous found in them, then 45, then 40, then 30, then 20, then 10. And then Abraham stops at 10. Why doesn’t Abraham pursue the question further? What would happen if five righteous were found in the city? What about two? What about one? What would happen if God found no one who does good, not even one?
The New Testament picks up Abrahams question, takes it even further, and answers it with a “yes.”
In Romans 3, Paul quotes this psalm and uses it to say, “No one is righteous, no, not one… all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus…”
Will God spare his creation even if no one righteous can be found in it? Yes. Even more, he will be incarnated into it to become that very righteous person himself.
In Christ, the first verse of the psalm is made untrue and the last verse of the psalm is fulfilled.
Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion!
When God restores the fortunes of his people,
let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad.
Notes on the Poem
This poem requires a bit of extra mental leg work and rewards repeated reading. It builds its web of meanings through many allusions to other works. Sometimes that takes the form of entire lines lifted from other sources. At other times a word or phrase will nod to another poem, song, or scene from a movie. The idea here isn’t plagiarism; it is to deepen and thicken the meaning of both works by stacking them on top of one another.
T. S. Eliot did this all the time. The list of allusions for his poem The Waste Land reads like a syllabus for a course on the history of Western literature. He uses the allusions to serve the overall thrust of the poem, that after WWI the project of Western meaning-making has been shattered and shown to be fatally flawed. Something similar is going on in this poem.
If you want to understand some of the things the poem is saying, it will help to trace some of the echoes back to their source. As with all of these psalm poems, the most prominent source of allusions will be the Bible itself, but I’ll point out a few of the others here to get you started.
The door opened and the dancing girls came,
The music and the performers, the bodies
Spun in the tempest, hardly touching.
In Dante’s Inferno, the adulterers inhabit a circle of Hell in which they are caught up in a great storm (representing the passions that ruled them in life). The winds are constantly pulling them apart from one another. They are caught up in the air, colliding but unable to hold one another.
Like Dante, the main character in this poem also enters a kind of Hell. (He even meets a dark guide, like Virgil.) However, instead of being a place where people are punished for their sin, here their vices run rampant. The ghosts run the show and the speaker identifies himself as one of them.
Every face a distant star.
The phrase “distant star” is an allusion to the song Suburban War from Arcade Fire’s album The Suburbs. I think the album is one of the finest critiques of the dislocation and alienation in modern life that the 21st century has yet produced. It fits right alongside both this poem and psalm 53.
If these were the voices
Of my dead friends or
Just the gramophone?
This is from a haiku by George Seferis (and from Stephen King’s Bag of Bones).
He said, “You’re like to go missing
In your sleep.”
Just the slightest nod to another of the poem’s sources, the Sleep No More experience at the McKittrick Hotel in New York City.
The piano played itself in the corner
Can anyone spot this one? (I can’t give you all the answers.) Clue: it is a reference to a TV show that plays into the setting of this poem. Here’s another clue: The House of the Rising Sun.
If you serve the Red Rose of York,
Or the White Rose of Lancaster.
The passage is the same:
Two coins for the ferryman.
Just a little bit of English history (the War of the Roses) and some Greek mythology there (the crossing of the river Styx).
Be patient with all that is unanswered
Inside your soul.
This is from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet. I highly recommend Rilke’s slim volume of letters; it is full of wisdom.
The answer to suffering is not an answer,
But an experience.
As Job learned.
“The end is here, and the son of man is delivered.”
The garden they are in is a kind of Gethsemane. The stranger is Christ.
This is bitter business.
Now cracks a noble heart.
Good night, sweet prince. Good night.”
He said and wiped away an imaginary tear.
The rest is silence.
Fans of Shakespeare might recognize the end of Hamlet here.
Poem—Two Coins For The Ferryman
There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun.
It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And me, O God, for one.
-The House of the Rising Sun, Traditional Folk Ballad
I.
The door opened and the dancing girls came,
The music and the performers, the bodies
Spun in the tempest, hardly touching.
Ghosts moved in masquerade.
And I am one.
Every room was glass and flashing,
Every face a distant star.
There was acceleration
And flickering and fever.
The falling bodies spun
Like dark dust sifting
And I am one.
The piano played itself in the corner
And everyone danced
But no one was listening.
Someone grabbed my face and kissed me.
I wanted to ask if the end had come,
Was yet to come, or was here among us?
I wanted to ask:
If these were the voices
Of my dead friends or
Just the gramophone?
There was a man next to me at the bar
With a cigarette in his lips
And a pile of burnt ends beneath his chair.
He introduced himself as my guide.
“With such deep games played
In lightless corners, one must be careful,”
He said, “You’re like to go missing
In your sleep.”
He bent close to me to confide,
“The fear isn’t believing nothing,
but in coming to believe such horrible things,”
(At this he gestured around him at the house)
“as though they were nothing.
It is the silent, internal slipping that gets you—
down the crapper with the rest of time.”
He winked as though he had imparted something important.
“It doesn’t matter
If you serve the Red Rose of York,
Or the White Rose of Lancaster.
The passage is the same:
Two coins for the ferryman.”
He lit another cigarette with the last bit of the old one
He stank the way a drunk stinks.
I listened to his words,
But could only hear
A loud noise coming from inside me
Reciting the words that everyone who is lost knows:
I am alone.
I am alone.
I am alone.
I fled.
II.
I stumbled into a garden
And shut the door on the distant music.
A man was there, kneeling.
I asked him, “Do I know you?”
And this is what he said:
“We are on the high wire now. And tumbling.
Every line is bent, trussed, and scattered.
I know how young you are.
I know you have feared all the wrong things.”
He laid his open palm on my chest
And felt the fear flutter there.
I bowed myself beside him.
“I know it seems there are so many reasons to believe,
And so many reasons to throw it all away.
Be patient with all that is unanswered
Inside your soul.
The only thing left is not something you will do;
It is something that will happen to you.
You are caught in something irreversible,
And the only way out is through.
The answer to suffering is not an answer,
But an experience.”
I felt nauseous and I tried to stand.
He glanced at the door.
“The end is here, and the son of man is delivered.”
III.
The entrance to the garden opened
And a loud parade flowed into the silence.
Many voices sang together:
“To live is self,
To die is unthinkable,
So we will take our sin in sips.
We have gathered our petty kingdoms,
But it is your universe, so we will wait
If you stagger to the skull’s place.
Come, shaker, rattle us down.
Christ the ridiculous,
Take your crown.”
One man broke off from the rest
And grasped the kneeling stranger
And kissed him, saying,
“Thou my God,
I would pry open your inner parts
And swallow you down with sauces
As one eats an oyster.”
The stranger pulled away but couldn’t
Break the man’s grip so he cried
And held onto his captor,
Who continued relentlessly:
“The sight of you repulses me.
Where is the knowledge I bargained for?
God, my God. Come,
Let us reason together.
Did you not make eyes
To look around? This mouth
To swallow down?
These reticulated fingers
To take and take and take—
First a little, then a lot, then everything?”
Someone raised their voice over the din and said,
“We have come to the end
of our time together, I am afraid.”
They lifted the stranger and dragged him away.
The speaker continued,
“This is bitter business.
Now cracks a noble heart.
Good night, sweet prince. Good night.”
He said and wiped away an imaginary tear.
The rest is silence.
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I did not spot the TV show reference, but something else entirely. Your Psalm 14 poem!
“The circles of redemption are the beachhead of God’s goodness pressing into his creation gone wild.” Beautiful image. Rilke and Arcade Fire—yes! The disorienting Gesthemane feel of the poem really comes across.