On the Psalms of Hope and Nearness

a brief gathering of old verses, for whoever needs them

The psalmists were not strangers to loneliness. They wrote in caves and in cities, in court and in exile, and a great many of them wrote in the small hours, when the lamp gutters and the heart asks whether anyone is listening at all. What is curious, and what the centuries have not worn out of these poems, is that the question is so often answered not with a doctrine but with a presence.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. — Psalm 23

The hope of the psalter is not the hope that nothing will go wrong. The shadow is granted; the valley is granted; the enemies at the table are granted. What is promised, again and again, is company. The hope is relational. It is the hand on the shoulder when the road is at its worst.

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. — Psalm 133

And there is the other half of it, which the psalmists never let us forget: that the nearness of the divine and the nearness of one another are not two separate hopes but one. To dwell together is itself called good and pleasant — not a means to some further blessing, but the blessing. Connection is not the waiting room. Connection is the room.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him. — Psalm 42

So the soul speaks to itself, and in speaking to itself refuses to be alone even within. This too is a kind of company — the company a person keeps with the better part of himself, which knows what the discouraged part has forgotten: that morning has come before, and will come again, and that we are not, in the end, the sum of our worst hours.

Take these as small lanterns, then. They were lit a long time ago, by people who also did not know how their story would end, and they are burning still.