Psalm 46—The Silence Between Breaths of Bellsong

"It is the space where the emptiness is that the Lord wants as his own."

A Note From Andy

The theology notes for this Psalm come from a theme in my own Bible study over the past few years on how symbols in the Bible work. It has been an enlightening season that has completely changed the way I read the Bible.

Psalm 46 ties into the symbolic trajectory of mountains and water in the Bible, two of the images we’ll be looking at in the upcoming course on biblical imagery. So if you want to dive deeper into this stuff, join the course.

Rendition of Psalm 46

God is my shelter and strength.
His solace finds me in all my trouble
His help follows me through all my fears.
Therefore I will be at peace though the earth gives way,
Though the mountains shake and slip into the heart of the sea,
Though its waters roar and foam,
And the mountains tremble at its rising.

There is a river whose streams bring joy to the city of God,
The holy dwelling place of the Most High.
God is in her midst; she will not be shaken.
God is her help when morning dawns.
The wayward nations roar, the kingdoms tremble
When God speaks, the earth melts.
The God of Hosts is with us
The God of Jacob is our mountain fortress.

Come see the works of the Lord,
How he desolated the earth.
He makes battle cease to the ends of the earth.
He breaks the bow and snaps the spear.
He burns the chariots with fire.

“Be still and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations.
I will be exalted in all the earth.”
The God of Hosts is with us
The God of Jacob is our rock of refuge.

Notes on Psalm 46

Note #1: On Mountains Slipping Into The Sea

Therefore I will be at peace though the earth gives way,
Though the mountains shake and slip into the heart of the sea,
Though its waters roar and foam,
And the mountains tremble at its rising.

If you can wrap your head around what is happening in these verses, it can act as a case study in how the whole Bible references itself in order to build its meanings over time. (And, in a shameless plug for the upcoming Bible course, that is exactly what we’ll be doing together starting on February 13.)

These verses take us back to Genesis 1 and into the heart of what both water and mountains mean in the Bible. Genesis 1:1, 2 says:

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep (tehom). And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

The Bible opens in a watery wasteland. We tend to think of the pre-created state as “nothingness” because science has taught us about concepts like the Big Bang and vacuums and zero. However, the ancients didn’t conceive of the uncreated state as “nothing,” but as a chaotic sea, the abyss (tehom). The spirit hovering over the uncreated water sets the baseline of the image of the sea as one of chaos and evil for the rest of the Bible. It poses a question: what will happen to the chaos? Can it be ordered? Can a place be found for life and flourishing in the chaotic sea?

The rest of the chapter answers those questions.

On day two of the creation sequence in Genesis 1, God separates the water two times: once vertically, creating the waters above and waters below, and then he separates it again horizontally, creating dry land. Psalm 104 shows us that the ancient Hebrews didn’t picture the appearance of dry land as a draining away of the water into the ground (like what happens after a flood), but as a mountain bursting up through the sea of chaos (like what happened when Hawaii appeared).

Here is Psalm 104:5-8

"[God] set the earth on its foundations,
so that it should never be moved.
You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
At your rebuke they fled;
at the sound of your thunder they took to flight.
The mountains rose, the valleys sank down
to the place that you appointed for them.”

So at the end of the second day of Genesis 1, we have something that looks like an oceanic island, a sea mountain about to be transformed into a mountain garden.

As the biblical storyline develops, we learn that the mountain of God is the place where God dwells with his people. The archetypal mountain takes many names and corresponds to several earthly mountains, for example, Jerusalem (Mount Moriah), Sinai, the Mount of Transfiguration, and so on. In fact, the story of the Bible can be retold as a series of mountaintop meetings God has with his people in order to bring them back to his holy mountain to dwell with him forever.

So in Psalm 46, the psalmist is drawing on on these rich images of mountains and the sea. When you read a line like “Though the mountains shake and slip into the heart of the sea” in the light of the larger meaning of these images in the whole Bible, the psalm takes on an even deeper meaning. It is saying, “I will not be afraid even if the whole world comes apart, even if my life tips over into chaos, even if all the good things I have in life are destroyed, I have God and he is with me and I will be OK. He is the true rock, the true mountain that stands over and against all the chaotic water.”

Note #2: That Time Jesus Talked About Mountains Falling Into the Sea.

There is also a subversive note to this Psalm that Jesus picks up on in Mark 11.

Here is Mark 11: 22, 23 :

“And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.”

I’ve often heard Jesus’s words used to say something like, “If you have enough faith, you can pray for anything and God will do it.” Which isn’t true. That interpretation has damaged people’s confidence in their own faith and in God when they pray for something really hard and God doesn’t give it to them. What happened? Isn’t their prayer supposed to move mountains? The problem must be that they didn’t have enough faith. Isn’t that the plain reading of the text?

The problem is that with great literature like the Bible, you have to learn its rules if you want to learn how to correctly access its meanings. There is a lot more going on in that passage than meets the eye. We can’t do a deep dive here, but the answer lies in the rest of the context of the passage in Mark 11.

Jesus goes into Jerusalem riding on a donkey. Then he leaves for the night. When he is walking back in he curses the fig tree in a symbolic prophetic act of judgment against the temple (referencing Jeremiah 7 and 8 and Micah 4). Then he goes into the temple and drives out the money changers (and quotes Jeremiah 7 and Isaiah 56). Next, he comes back out and the fig tree is withered. His disciples as him about it he explains his actions by alluding to Psalm 46.

But when he says, “This mountain” he doesn’t mean “any ol’ mountain.” He means the temple mount and all that the temple means. Psalm 46 fits right into this context. The psalm starts with mountains and seas, but the rest of it is about the temple. In the context of the passage, the temple is the mountain in question. And both the cursing of the fig tree and his driving out the money changers are symbolic acts of judgment against what the temple officials have done to God’s house (just as the priests in Jeremiah 7 and 8 had). 

So what does it all mean? To the early Jewish Christians, I’m sure it meant that they didn’t have to be afraid if, say, the Roman army comes and destroys the temple mount (as happens in 70 AD). On a more personal level (tying in the broader meanings of mountain and sea in the Bible), you don’t have to be afraid if your life falls apart and the things you trusted devolve to chaos. Why? Because, like the psalm says, God is your shelter and strength. Jesus is what the temple was always pointing toward. He is the place where God dwells and he is always with you. As he says during the cleansing of the temple scene in John 2, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again,” but he is talking about the temple of his body.

The hidden subversive message of Psalm 46 says: If I have God, I don’t need Jerusalem, to which the Jews would have looked as the locus of God’s presence on earth. If I have God, I don’t even need the temple.

Lo and behold, what do you have when you get to the end of the Bible and there is a New Jerusalem? It is described as a mountain that has a river but no sea. The whole city is a cube (like the holy of holies in the temple), but there is no temple, for God is everywhere. “Behold, now the dwelling place of God is with humanity. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be their God.” (Revelation 21:3.)

Note #3: Why Does The City Of God Have A River In it?

The short answer to the question is: because Eden did.

All of the places God dwells from the tabernacle, to the temple, to Mt. Zion, the “city of God,” to the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21 and 22 point back to the first place where God dwelt with humanity, the garden in Eden.

BibleProject (an excellent resource on biblical theology) calls these touch-points between God and humanity, “hotspots” of God’s presence, zones within the physical realm inside which God is especially present. They are decked out in garden motifs (for instance, the lamp in the tabernacle meant to evoke the tree of life or the floral carvings in the temple) not only for decoration but to signify the meanings of Eden. This is also true of the river of life.

In Genesis 2:10, we read that

“A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.”

Now we see why this psalm evokes the archetypal dwelling place of God (Eden) by pointing out that there is a river in the city of God that brings joy to its people. This agrees with Ezekiel’s vision of a river flowing from the threshold of the temple out into the Dead Sea (Ezekiel 47). But this is not just any ordinary river, it is an image of the very life of God that was supposed to flow out from the temple and cause life on earth to flourish. Ezekiel signals the supernatural life-giving power of this river when he says that it will make the Dead Sea fresh and that “everything will live wherever the river goes.”

The idea that the river of life is found in the city of God also agrees with John’s eschatological vision of the New Jerusalem. Though there is no sea in the new creation (in the sense that there is no chaos or evil), there is a river that flows from the throne of God and into the city. All of this is a symbol-laden way of talking about where the life of God can be found and what effects it has when it is loose in the world.

Notes on the Poem

This poem had many incarnations before it settled into its final form of three sonnets.

The sonnet is a poetic form that rose to prominence in the Medieval era of most commonly 12, 14, or 16 lines. (The three sonnets below are 14 lines each.) Another trademark of the sonnet is the volta or “turn” in the second section of the poem that is not marked by a stanza break but by a change in meter or topic. Also, many sonnets have a rhyme scheme that is capped off by a rhyming couplet in the last two lines. You won’t find much of a volta in the sonnets below, but the last lines have a rhyming couplet in each one.

I added the note that this poem is “for L’Abri” because Psalm 46 is about the temple and its many incarnations in the earthly world and L’Abri has shaped my understanding of what the temple can actually look like when you knock on its door. If you’re wondering what the “house” is in the second stanza, it is the manor house where the English branch of L’Abri happens.

The Sources of the Poem

Fans of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Four Quartets will find nods to Eliot’s incredible poem here in a few lines. I’ll let you find them for yourselves. If you aren’t familiar with that masterful poem, listen to this first.

Most of these lines came to me years ago as I walked the lanes around L’Abri and “watched the leaves go bright as pennies.” So the landscape around the manor house is also a source, as it is for a lot of my poetry.

The final “source” for the images of this poem is the Bible itself. The idea of feeling “the firekiss” and “holding the coals” is a reference to Isaiah 6. The river that makes things alive wherever it goes through which one person in the poem wants to walk “ankle-deep, hip-deep, head under and spinning” is a reference to the river that flows from the temple in Ezekiel 47. (And also to the “river whose streams make glad the city of God” in Psalm 46.) The person who wants to hire himself “like a lost son to the fidelities he abandoned” is a Prodigal Son reference, another recurrent theme in these poems. And the “city of refuge” line is a reference to the cities in the Old Testament to which murderers could flee to take shelter from recrimination for their crimes.

Thanks for reading, folks. Here is the poem.

Poem—The Silence Between Breaths of Bellsong

For L’Abri

God, I would walk with you again
Through the high heather. That Autumn
I traced a path through the garden
While I prayed and fretted and watched
The leaves go bright as pennies.
The late roses filled with early snow
And all the stars that ever were wheeled overhead
As your ghost moon tumbled through the sky.
I did not suspect as I huddled with the others
And complained playfully about the cold
That love had become nearly itself.
I wondered and wonder still
As I gave and took, missed and was missed:
Is there another goodness in life than this?

God, we came to the house for different reasons
And the same. One came to hold the coal,
To feel the firekiss for himself.
Another to run the river ankle-deep,
Hip-deep, head under and spinning.
One came to hire himself, like a lost son,
To the fidelities he abandoned.
One came to hear the sound of birds
In a draughty chapel in the silence
Between breaths of bellsong.
Another ran for the city of refuge
To take stock, to pay the cost, to hold fast,
To find himself and be lost at last.

God, that Autumn I fell asunder.
It is the space where the emptiness is
That the Lord wants as his own.
Frayed and scattered, I staggered.
I opened my hands and received back
The years the darkling had eaten.
I opened my mouth and took
Deep heaven’s snowflake bread,
Costless, priceless, costing everything.
I was pierced as Christ was pierced.
Then, broken and sated,
I prayed and laughed and waited.

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Read more from Andy on Still Point (reflections on deconstruction and why people leave Christianity) and Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God).

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