
I’ve read the old Hebrew poets for years, and oh, the stuff they say: beautiful, odious, comforting, confounding, sometimes you just have to pick a clause, up the ante, and see where it goes. Another point here, about the Psalms, is their insistence (with notable exceptions) of God made available through a kind of toiling righteousness. My own experience, however, aligns more closely with Christian Wiman’s:
…faith, like art, is most available when I cease to seek it, cease even to believe in it, perhaps, if by belief one means that busy attentiveness, that purposeful modern consciousness that ‘knows’ its object.
I’m a Skinned Christian
But I am a worm, and no man. – Psalm 22:6
I am a worm.
I’m any number of creepy little dirt burrowers,
moreover: I’m the slick glistening trail of a Leopard slug,
a pink puckered crease on a buzzard’s neck,
I’m a cottage curd fallen out of the fridge,
the russet deposit of wind-borne fungus,
I’m sticky steam sucked through a kitchen duct,
and grease-glazed dust on a Venetian blind,
I’m a drip driven off by a wiper blade,
like the passing thought of a venial mind.
And being the village idiot,
I have posted my single thesis to the trapdoor
of the crypt under a virtual church in Witlessberg,
stating:
God beguiles me!
So I’m trashing your tracts,
dumping your perky worship tunes
and running off with my bewilderment (thank you very much).
For when I strive to believe my soul recedes,
when I rend my robe, bruise my knees,
righteous to recite your creedal decrees —
the heavens yawn, God shrugs.
But when I find myself at the end of myself
— as happens these many times —
and flop down on the brown bank of a dying river,
I see wind, with fingers of grace, lift dead grass;
I see the sun bring its twilight, without stain or shadow,
to halo the passing crests of water
and soften this clay-hearted shore —
and blood moves deeper,
breath comes roomier, and life
stirs faith and I stand and look about.