Poems and Psalms 3. Rejoice and Rescue.

Readings, Psalm 34 and Romans 6:1-11
Image, Cressida Campbell, Flannel Flowers (2013)

Imagine with me, for a moment, that you’re on holiday in a new town. As you mosey about something strange catches your eye. A giant billboard celebrating shiny white teeth. Having seen this first sign, you can’t stop noticing all around the town other similar signs, posters, ads, and murals. Each of them a variation on a theme: healthy teeth, beautiful smiles, minty toothpaste, gentle brushing – kids and adults of all genders beaming bright white teeth and enthusiastically gripping or displaying a dazzling array of toothpastes and brushes.
 
Having now become fixated with the sheer amount of these signs, their uncountable multitude spread in every nook and cranny across the town, you actually meet your first local. Naturally, only one thought occupies your mind: I’ve got to get a look at this person’s teeth. Now, here’s the question for all of us: what is the state of this person’s teeth?
 
Because our first guess might be, well, clearly a town that so vigorously promotes healthy oral hygiene will be filled with people with pearly whites. But if that was the case, we might wonder, what’s the need for all these vigilant reminders? On second thought we might ask: do all these reminders, all these celebrations of toothbrushing actually reflect the fact that this whole town has, for generations, neglected their teeth? Is this whole town adverse to brushing, ignorant of gum health, and circular-motion brushing? Are these signs not a reflection of town values, but a desperate attempt to change the people’s habits?
 
The psalms contain a lot of calls to praise, and more than a few appeals to rejoice. It was hard to get some exact figures, but I found one source which noted that the English word praise occurs 248 times in the King James Bible, and about 155 of those times across the book of Psalms. Rejoice (in its varying forms) occurs about 260 times across scripture.
 
And so, the question might be posed: are all these references there because Christians are such joyful and grateful people, consistently rejoicing and praising God… or are they there because we perhaps ought to be… but are struggling to internalise the message?

 
This, we might say, is not limited to the imperative to rejoice and praise, but is the nature of all commandments. We don’t need a law, unless people are breaking the law – laws are responsive to behaviour deemed incongruous or unconducive to the kind of society those in power seek to construct. Thou shall not murder, is only needed after Cain slew Abel.
 
Jeremiah captures this well. Looking ahead to the days surely coming when the Living God shall make a new covenant with the house of Israel, the distinctive characteristic of this covenant is the way it will not need all external signposts, but live within the people:
But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord.
They shall say to each other ‘Know the Lord.’ Know the Lord, is the all-encompassing stand in for the whole of the Law. For if one truly knows the Lord one loves God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength and their neighbour as themselves. If one knows the Lord, their heart is filled with praise and their life with rejoicing. But until those coming days, we will, it seems, need to be reminded to rejoice, we will need to be told, do not go on sinning just so grace can abound.
 
Why is this the case? What makes it so hard to – as we heard in today’s psalm - bless the Living God at all times; and keep God’s praise continually in our mouths? And how do we consider the answer to this shortcoming (if we are to understand it thus) in a way that doesn’t feel like a public flogging, shame-inducing scolding, or God-ordained guilt-trip? That is to say, how do we – in anticipation of the coming days of the fulfilment of the new covenant – write the knowledge of God on our hearts so that praise and rejoicing might well up out of infinite baths of grace, rather than the shallow pools of obligation?
 
Well, since we’re in our poems and psalms series, let us consider this in light of a poem. 

James Merrill, was a contemporary of last week’s poet, James Schuyler. The poem we’re thinking with today is “Rescue” from his 1995 collection, A Scattering of Salts. The poem has a slightly complex structure, but a very fun premise, so I’ll lay it out a little before reading two key excerpts. The poem narrates the poet and his partner driving along a rainy highway in Japan. They notice a turtle stuck trying to cross the busy road. The partner stops the car and hops out to carry the turtle to safety.
 
Dusk. Rain over          but asphalt hissing
Flooded clear          with sea light.
Sharply, sweet heart,       you swerved, pulled off,
ran back and snatching        the three-inch turtle
we almost hadn’t         missed as it started
its perilous crossing           deposited it
there! at the far         pasture’s edge--
mission so nimbly,               raptly accomplished
where dizzying beams              rushed both ways
and tears broke                from the tall trees
that I who saw             the marvel simply
filed it away         for future use.
We’d seen so many               marvels those days:
 
The poem then shifts to Merrill’s recollections of other marvels he has seen on this holiday, before returning to the present scene on the road, this time, however, narrated from the turtle’s perspective.
 
Back to the turtle,          here’s a tale
it can tell          till the end of time:
“Night was falling.             Too frightened to shrink
into my shell,          as the shattering lights
hurtled past           I took despairingly
slow steps             to appease them.
Upon chelonian               powers that shouldered
Terra herself          from a waste of waters
childlike I called       for help. Was heard!--
only then turning      to instinctive stone.
Shame upon me.     I had shut myself to
life even         as it uplifted
and heaved me into          a green haven.”
 
In case, like me (and I suspect most) you don’t know the word “chelonian,” it means, “of or pertaining to turtles.” I first came across this poem through another poet Garth Greenwell, who wrote about it with such appreciation and wonder. On that use of the chelonian, he notes that “it lavishes the little creature with dignity.” But we need to focus on the last part, as the turtle, childlike, calls for help and “Was heard!” I love the way it breaks in… in a beautiful way it is the counterpoint to the appeal in Psalm 6 last week. Recall the “-- how long?” which broke it through the breakdown of language. Where there we had “how long?” here we have “was heard!” As Greenwell notes, “the answer to all longing, human or chelonian; the whole yearning universe is in those two words.”
 
And yet, the titular moment of rescue is not met with rejoicing, praise, or thanksgiving. “Shame on me” – in the moment of grace, in the very moment of salvation, of being uplifted and placed into a green haven, the turtle turns to instinctive stone. At the moment it has the most to be thankful, upon being heard by some mysterious and tremendous force, it finds that out of instinct, it has shut itself to life. Poor turtle.
 
But also, poor poet. For the turtle’s inability to rejoice in being rescued draws us back to the line that ended the first section, where the poet, on watching this scene from the outside, takes it in stride: I who saw the marvel simply / filed it away for future use. The turtle’s failure allows the poem to draw us (and perhaps the poet) back to this moment, to the taking for granted of the many marvels he had seen in those days, that allowed something like this (which if it was not altogether significant to his life, was of utmost significance to the turtle) to pass by unpraised.

“The point of the poem” writes Greenwell, “is to wake the speaker up to that miracle, to imbue his experience of his own life with the marvelling meanings of the turtle’s account. To reenchant his relationship to his own existence—and so do the same for all of us reading the poem.”
 
We might say the same with the psalms of thanksgiving and praise. That these psalms with their reminders that, The Lord is near to the broken-hearted, and saves the crushed in spirit, wake us up as we speak and hear them, and reenchant our relationship to our existence, and to God and the marvels of God. They point us to marvels beyond ourselves so we can be readied to see them for what they are in our own lives.
 
The persistence then, of these calls to praise and rejoicing, not only in the psalms but across scripture is neither a reflection of Christians as shiny happy people, nor a kind of oppressive cajoling to be shiny happy people. It is impossible to praise continually and we must register the genre of psalms as poetry and thus not bind ourselves to reading them as literal imperatives. Because when these calls to praise and rejoicing are read poetically, they become something so much more valuable to a life of meaning and hope.
 
The call to praise embodies an invitation to open ourselves once more to life. These psalms call us into gratitude for the uplifting of grace, the heaving of Christ’s resurrection through which we are raised to newness of life. They awaken us to the marvels of God and make room for our voice within their words. But the good news is, that even when we, like the little turtle, freeze in the face of grace, even when we fail to respond as perhaps we ought to the goodness and grace of God, these calls to praise do not leave us in shame. Because they are, themselves, what we cannot always be. Even when the bibles are closed and our mouths are shut, their praise is continual (for they are not only sung to God, but in Christ, sung by God). They themselves are the grateful response. And even when we cannot fill our hearts or mouths with their joy, we can observe from afar. When we cannot feel it ourselves, we can simply take these words in, until the day we are ready to make the most of that filed away for future use, and write it on our hearts.

-- later in service

Let us take our mind back, once more, to that turtle. It is worth remembering and giving thanks, that despite the turtle's freezing up, despite failing to responding to the grace of being heard and rescued, it is still placed on the safe shores of the green haven. Now, the turtle's rescuer has no conception of the turtle's shame-filled lack of response, but we know, that even though God does know our response (or sometimes lack of) we too are still and nonetheless placed on safe shores, we are still and always held in the strong and sure hands of God. Wrapped up in God's tender and fierce and loving and rescuing embrace from which nothing can snatch us. Our capacity to offer resounding praise and live lives of perpetual gratitude does not determine, negate, or jeopardise what God has, in perfect freedom, willed from beginningless time to do: to be for us and for our salvation.