Friday, February 23, 2007

A psalm a day . . . the Lenten way!

SOMETIMES, the best ideas come to you out of the blue. That's the deal with what Revolution 21's doing for Lent this year: We're going to blog a psalm a day until Easter.

Since, naturally, your Mighty Favog didn't come up with his bright idea UNTIL WE WERE TWO DAYS INTO LENT, we're going to have to start off with a bang -- a Psalter three fer, as it were.

TO VENTURE INTO THE PSALMS is to peer back some 3,000 years into the life of King David -- his joys, his praises to God, his prophecies and his despair and repentance. At a minimum, scholars attribute 73 of the 150 psalms to David. On the top end, many Church saints and scholars throughout millennia have argued that David wrote them all (in which case, Psalm 137, for example, would be a prophetic writing -- just like Psalm 22).

Regardless, the psalms are great poetry, early liturgical song -- prayers to God of thanks, of sorrow and, sometimes, cries for vengeance against the enemies of the Jewish people. The psalms are the human condition, which remains essentially unchanged over thousands of years.

Anyway, we'll be starting (in the next post) with the best known of all the psalms -- the 23rd. Which leads me to explain why a Catholic boy like your Mighty Favog will be taking our psalm blogs from the -- decidedly Protestant -- King James Version of the Bible.

WELL, IT'S LIKE THIS. Southerners of a certain age and older could not escape the lyrical verse of the KJV. The South always has been Christ-haunted (if not always actively Christ-following), and the common culture of the Deep South in which I came of age tended to paint Our Lord in Reformation orange, and it had Him speaking to us in the thees and thous of King James' 17th-century England.

The KJV is as beautiful to hear as it is sometimes alien to modern ears. And it is how God sounds to those of us reared in a time and place where the word of God was proclaimed with medieval authority, if not exactly heeded with due diligence.

I know this will be completely alien to readers under, say, 40 -- maybe 35 -- but when I was in elementary school, the Gideons (as in the Gideon Bible . . . think hotel rooms) would come to our public school and hand out pocket New Testaments, which included the Old Testament books of Psalms and Proverbs.

And in sixth grade, Mrs. Horn -- before getting around to diagramming sentences and the like -- would lead us in prayer and Bible study. Particularly the psalms.

Now, being that I've had precisely no reason to diagram a sentence in, oh, 35 years, I'm pretty shaky on that particular skill. But bless her wife-of-Southern Baptist-preacher heart, it was Mrs. Horn who introduced me to the Psalms, and to the concept of actually reading the Bible, as opposed to letting it collect dust . . . and family birth dates, wedding dates and death dates.

And it was Mrs. Horn who helped make it impossible for me to hear the 23rd Psalm in any other tongue but the King's English -- King James' English.

Now . . . on to Psalms for Lent.

No comments: