An idea came to me the other day while I was flipping through my copy of Every Moment Holy, a book of liturgies for everyday life by Doug McKelvey. Each liturgy is written for a refreshingly particular moment in normal life with titles like “For the Keeping of Bees,” or “A Momentary Liturgy for a Fleeting Irritation,” or “A Liturgy for the Ritual of Morning Coffee.” (You can read many of the liturgies for free on the app.)
At the same time, I was thinking about a comment from a new subscriber that he liked the idea of the Darkling Psalter but didn’t know how to get into it. It struck me that this project could easily seem inaccessible. It is a bit of theology, a bit of reworked psalm, and a bit of some guy’s poetry. But who reads poetry? And who is this guy? And where is he getting this stuff? And can I really trust this unfamiliar take on reading the Bible?
In part, the hurdle is just part of being human. Starting a relationship with a text is like starting a relationship with a person. Everyone begins as a stranger. You start with nothing and you get to walk into the strange, confounding, delightful work of discovery. After a while you notice that certain gestures begin to stand out, certain quirks, turns of phrase, an easy laugh, a warm welcome. Slowly an image forms of the new person in your life that begins to smack of familiarity. You make friends. You find, to your delight, that this person has come to mean a great deal to you. They once meant nothing to you but now even thinking of them brings you pleasure.
Meeting a book (or a poem) can be like that too. It takes time. There is much risk. But if discovery becomes delight, a space can be opened inside you for another of those small, important relationships that make life so poignant and so good.
To that end, I thought I would take a page from Every Moment Holy and help readers overcome the initial hurdle of seeing unfamiliarity by creating posts that group some of these psalms and poems under more familiar headings. Starting with four poems for those moments in life when what you really need is a painful revelation.
When What You Need Is a Painful Revelation
In each of these five poems, characters come to the end of themselves and find, to their shock, a new world opens.
The Strange Light Fell On You and the Roses Like a Spear (Psalm 121)
I.
That day you walked the hills
To say goodbye just before Autumn ended
You watched some inward horizon,
Waiting for help. The land wore a fine snow.
The wind circled in the grass like wolves.
The footpath held a keen edge and you were cut.
Your firegod kept pace with you in the field,
A little ahead, a little to one side.
The pillar moved at a walk.
Sheep fled from it as it blackened
A long line in the grass backwards,
Bursting open the bristlecone
And setting the stiles on fire as if they weren’t there.
You watched it from the corner of your eye
And hunched yourself against the cold
And were surprised to find
The crushed heads of roses in your hands.
The light flickered and you longed to be overthrown
But what you felt was angry.
II.
You slipped back, alone and the others wandered on.
With each step, the fire moved and you moved with it.
The others turned back and waited, as friends do.
They tarried even as you cursed them.
They could see it all.
How the long-fingered hands of grief pried at you.
How what you all lived together
Each remembered differently and how death
Carved itself so easily between you.
You read it wrong for years.
You wanted to be right.
You rehearsed both parts
Of old conversations and lost sleep.
You could not hide what you’d suffered.
Neither could you kiss your small fists
And raise them to stream out windward.
You could only say,
“Thou pillaring God! Thou flare!
I am lost.”
The wind picked up and you couldn’t tell
If the things in it were blossoms or snow,
But the early cold burned like Pentecostal fire
And the strange light fell on you
And the roses like a spear.
Inside the Losing, You Hid Another Life (Psalm 147)
For Miranda.
I.
She gives you thanks, O God,
That you made your rumor run
Under the wind, wild as wolves,
Catching, coy, quicksilver—
Purple in fingers picking blackberries,
Gasping in the azaleas,
Cascading in Summer hollyhocks
Grown head high and higher. It is there
In the throaty chuckle of the ravens brooding
Like a gang of a black toads in the oak trees.
It is there at the spot where they found the fox den
When the kits showed themselves before going to ground.
Suddenly, the ravens burst from their cover and threw shadows
Down on her that almost had substance.
So your love passes in bright, slow time.
So you show yourself to her and dance away.
II.
She gives you thanks, O God,
That all that year she was a skein of something
Hoping to be raveled. You heard her prayers
But didn’t answer as she begged for blessings
And answers that would have ruined her.
So she pressed her hand to the wall and rattled
In the space between two trains,
Waiting for it to pass.
Meanwhile, every Saturday the choir came
To practice Sunday’s songs
And she listened from another room.
Every night, the grace gathered
Around the table at dinner,
In the hallowed halls of the real world
Ready to be passed again from hand to hand
In bits of bread and rolled grandly into cups of wine.
She walked the lane and was harrowed.
The trees were all louder
Than she could remember them being.
She was arrested mid-stride
By the way the light fell on things.
She joined the lyric of the lives of others
And fell into conversation to the clatter of tea things
With people who were kind to her.
After dark, the stars crowded the sky
As if it was the world’s last night
And slowly the fear crept upon her and it was good.
So you sometimes curve strange mercies down on us.
So inside the losing, you hid another life.
My God, My Whisper of Flame (Psalm 29)
I.
These three years the pain hasn’t lessened
But it visits me less. In Geneva,
Men gave their dogs my name to kick them.
I was hit with a bottle,
But do not know who threw it.
When the children found me
On the way to chapel, they made small jokes
Like those a razor makes.
There were always anxieties buzzing
Like flies. I waved them away
And they returned in the wake of my hand.
I was never good at hiding what I suffered.
My head ached continually. I barely ate.
At night I dreamed I was carried to the pulpit
But could find nothing to say.
Though I never doubted your love,
And cast myself upon your word,
I moved from fear to fear to fear.
When those same people knelt
To take the bread and wine
It was my own bloodcoin I gave them.
I placed the bread in their mouths
As my own flesh.
They cursed me and thrived.
They dipped their fingers into my wounds
And mourned and hated me for it.
Repentance ran like quicksilver
From house to house those years.
Men swore themselves to Christ.
Everywhere things burst to life.
But I was cast out.
II.
In Strasbourg, you have been generous.
I live beside the baker and his bread wakes me
Through the window every morning.
The coffee is here. My books are here.
I can write. The room is quiet.
Beyond the room, Idelette is making breakfast.
Her children call me father. In the garden,
We have laid bulbs in the ground
And they will soon return, first the snowdrops,
Then daffodils, then crocuses, then all the others
Until we cut the last blooms in late Summer.
In the afternoon, I will have a glass of wine and walk.
In the evening, I will preach again
And pray with my small congregation
Of Frenchmen who have also fled here.
I do not know if this peace is a reward
Or a punishment for having suffered
And wanting it to end.
I gather it with both hands nonetheless
And wait for it to grow, like the flowers.
III.
When the letter from Geneva came,
I prayed and could not sleep.
I paced in the garden behind the house.
I raised my empty hands to you and fire fell
On the small maple I planted three years ago,
But it did not burn.
I staggered back, “My God,
My whisper of flame,” I begged.
“Send another.”
I came to myself on the ground,
Thrumming, shoeless, dazed.
The dawn was rising, but
All the birds had gone silent.
I heard a voice call my name
And turned but no one was there.
I answered, “Here I am.”
Things inside me stilled
And I thought: enough.
The Years You Were Always Elsewhere (Psalm 86)
When the snow fell
You forgot the lake was there,
And walked out onto the ice.
You looked back
at the house with all its lights.
As the cracks started to show themselves
and you didn’t want to leave.
You laid down
As a man who has seen the angel,
As death itself.
In the cold glass your own rumpled image
Pressed its cheek to yours
to whisper something
About the shards it had become,
About the rainbow bridge that passes out of seeing,
You saw the things beneath the ice:
The flotsam of your renunciations.
So much debris from old disasters
That found you without warning or herald or witness.
The years you were always elsewhere
And always regretting it.
The years the distance only grew between things
Though you tried to devote yourself
To the old fidelities you once believed.
So much lost to the water.
You pawed at the ice,
But you couldn’t reach any of it.
You shouted: “Come back! Come home!”
You promised your whole remaining days
If only everything would fly back to you
From the far side of the chasm.
You tried to stand.
The cold had you now.
You remembered
What you needed to remember too late:
You had already wagered everything you had
Out there on the ice.
Chrysalis and Crucifixion (Psalm 107)
I.
Some wandered in a wasteland of their own making,
Where the sand was glass and bones,
And everything around them was mirrors.
Their own images stretched in every direction.
Everything mimicked their gestures,
But nothing ever touched.
They fed themselves on limelight.
They consoled themselves with hopes
That came to nothing. They lived
By the promise of always moving on.
One man fell down, spent.
He didn’t know until he laid down
That he laid down to die.
He was streaming out behind himself,
Hoping to be raveled.
He covered his face with his hands
And finally, the dark came.
He heard a voice behind him, an echo,
Like the old myth, and it told him
About the consolation that dogged his steps,
About what comes after the glamour,
About the benediction at the end.
II.
Some lay in darkness, nearing death,
Sweating in bed as if with fever.
They stared at the black ceiling, seeing
Those days when they could touch both walls
Of their hope, so small a cell it was.
They thought of all the ways that sorrow
Never gets stopped. They remembered
How long the way back was once they got lost.
And how hard it is to feel things
When the old long longing
Trembles in their trembling hands.
One man writhed all night and tried
To shake that special way of being afraid.
He worried at the promises of the Almighty
As a dog worries a bone,
Reciting the reasons to believe and
Setting them against all the interminable hours
When the help he needed didn’t come;
When the voice that should have been there
To say, “I am here. You are here.”
Was not; when he knew for sure
That he couldn’t save those to whom he belonged,
Whom even now he can only touch
As they are falling away.
He would tell them if he could:
Come back! All is forgiven!
But he missed his chance.
Somewhere it came in time's unfolding,
And he was elsewhere. And yet
There were those times he was told the truths
For which he was not ready.
They return to him now as a litany of lost years.
He gently spoke the words of a prayer
Into the glimmering darkness
In which he sensed something was
Invisible and vast and holding itself silent.
III.
Some were only fools and sinners
Who fled their fidelities because
They thought they tired of life,
But it was only the dying they wearied of.
They left behind all the moments
When they had a chance and went West.
This was only one more
Of the little disappearances
They’d built their lives on—
longer than the others, but of a kind.
A small thing really, the leaving,
But costing everything.
One man, worn thin, trembling, scourged
With freedom, was troubled by dreams
In which things he loved accused him
Of things he could not remember doing.
He awoke to a darkness that was quieter
Than any night he remembered. He walked outside.
He fell down in the sand at the place
Where, years ago, he’d thrown his ring.
He fell to his knees again,
Praying, digging, feeling for it.
He scratched at the dirt for hours.
He saw all his past indecisions at once.
He thought that all his life had come to this.
If only he could find it,
He might follow the bent lines of love home.
But he found nothing and returned to bed.
His hands bled as he slept and when he awoke
His sheets looked as though they had been painted with roses.
He stumbled to the shower and the blood
Ran off his hands and feet, his side.
His body was a blood canvas, a benediction.
Beginnings are marked this way,
As are endings. Chrysalis and crucifixion.
IV.
Some went down to the sea in ships
And found the cold breaking of endless
Oceans of ice that fell to the sea,
Unwitnessed but for their northern eyes.
When the floe locked about the ship,
They emptied it and walked
Out into a year of night on moving ice.
They slept in sleet under reindeer skins
And took tea in the dark, always at 11:00 and 4:30.
They huddled around the memory of being English.
They lit lamps and thought of warmth.
They pressed together on piles of penguin shit
Because it was the only place the tide didn’t touch.
At night the whales broke through the ice
Beneath their beds and the men
Slid sleeping into the black water.
One man found himself outside the tent, alone.
Below him there was only the blue darkness
That floats on the black darkness.
Above his head, the works of the Lord:
Green ribbons of fire and every star that ever was.
He was shaking, staring upward, praying
Prayers from childhood. Father,
Save us. Forgive us. Remember us.
He was all exposed bone.
He stood at the sea’s throat, the block,
The brink. The scripture rattled up
From some place it took the cold to find.
The ice groaned, the water groaned,
The very air held itself bated.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.
Though my flesh and my heart faileth
Thou art the strength of my heart
And my portion forever.
He heard the soft whistle of a whaler,
Almost a dream itself but there it was again.
The others stood in their blankets like dead men
At the last trump, risen.
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).
Support the Project
Any work of sufficient length is only sustained contact with by those who benefit from it.
An idea can be a fragile thing and 150 poems and translations is a big idea. I meant this project to be ambitious though and, if it is ever complete, it will be the work of years.
I know the only way I’m ever going to finish this project is if I know people read, value, and support it. Whether you subscribe or not, if you like a poem or find a rendition of a Psalm helpful, drop me a line or leave a comment and let me know.