Happy are those
who do not follow the
advice of the wicked,
or take the path that
sinners tread,
or sit in the seat of
scoffers;
but their delight is in the
law of the Lord,
and on his law they
meditate day and night.
They are like trees
planted by streams of
water,
which yield their fruit in
its season,
and their leaves do not
wither.
In all that they do, they
prosper.
The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the
wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will
not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the
congregation of the righteous;
For the Lord watches over
the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will
perish.
Psalm
1
Reflection – It is time for a new running series on
the blog, one that will likely run for as long as the blog itself runs. Welcome
to the “Monday Psalter.” (UPDATE: This later became the 'weekly psalter', as its normal day of running changed from Monday to Friday).
I have felt
for some time that the psalms get short shrift in our contemporary spiritual
exercises. When is the last time you heard a sermon on the psalms, or were
encouraged to pray the psalms daily? Ever? How often do you pray the psalms?
Priests and religious are supposed to pray them every day, and perhaps most do,
but we never seem to talk about it or encourage it or seem terribly enthused
about them.
And yet the
psalms are the very backbone of Christian worship and liturgy, and have been
since the beginning. They were the prayers of Our Lord and Our Lady, the
prayers of the Jewish people, and that alone makes them normative for
Christians. The very words that God Incarnate used to address His Father are
privileged words for our own efforts to speak to God.
And from the
beginning of the Church, the psalms formed a solid core of our liturgical
worship. The liturgy of the hours grew from a simple brief office prayed by all
the faithful in the first cathedrals of the great cities of the Roman Empire to
much more elaborate and lengthy offices prayed in the deserts of the monks, to
its present form which has elements of both.
And so I want
to read through the psalms each week, starting with Psalm 1 and getting (God
willing) all the way through to Psalm 150. The blog is named Ten Thousand
Places, and these are 150 of the places the Christian people have always sought
and found the face of God in the world.
Psalm 1 is a
favorite of mine. I know a little Biblical Hebrew, and I like to pray it in its
original language, where it has a truly lovely poetic cadence. Ashrey ha-ish… happy is the man. The
Hebrew word is derived from the word for footsteps, suggesting something like a
path or a sequence of movements. To be ‘ashrey’ is to have one’s life proceed
along the course that will lead to success. To have things unfold, step by
step, in a good way.
And so we have
the whole famous ‘two ways’ that are a dominant theme in the wisdom tradition
of the Old Testament. There are only two ways in the world, ultimately. As C.S.
Lewis put it, in the end there are only two kinds of people, those who say to
God ‘Your will be done,’ and those to whom God says, sadly, ‘Your will be
done.’ And that is a pretty accurate summary of this psalm.
Wicked means
willful, headstrong, unwilling to be led, to be taught, to surrender to the
will and law of God. The alternative is not some artificial and pompous path of
moral rectitude, but to meditate, to ponder, to read the law of God day and
night. There is an interiorization already happening here, a relationship, a
sense of receptivity, of humility, of faith.
And in this
comes this beautiful image, so beloved of the writers of Scripture, of the tree
planted by the waters, leaves ever green, yielding its fruit, as opposed to the
path of the willful and disobedient who are swept away like chaff. It bears
noting that the wicked in this psalm, set in the life of Israel, have full
access to the Law and could root their lives in it as well as anyone. It was
their own choice to uproot themselves from the soil with the living water that
nourishes the soul.
And it is so
in our day as well. But this psalm is not to bring us to judge other people or
look at the root system of others’ lives—no, it is about me and you and how
deeply, how often, how seriously do we meditate on the law of Christ, ponder it
day and night, and build our lives on it? This is the ‘ashrey’ of the
Christian, the footsteps of Christ left on the soil of the world, and the blessedness
of our life wholly depends on how we attend to those footsteps and walk in them
each day.
