As the deer longs for the water brooks,
so longs my soul for you, O God. (Psalm 42, verse 1)
Appointed in the Episcopal prayer book for today, Psalm 42 speaks to the experience of a middle school teacher in the last week before the winter holidays.
This was my 39th such week, so I should have the courage borne of past successes. Yet each morning this week, I awoke before four o'clock with a sense of dread and inadequacy. Ahead of me each day was a variation on the same challenge: would my prepared questions / instructional game / rehearsal plan / performance for parents engage the students for the hour? Could I maintain a professional demeanor, be energetic facing lethargy, calm facing sarcasm, supportive facing students' anxieties, indulgent (to a point) of students' giddiness?
Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul,
and why are you so disquieted within me?
Put your trust in God,
for I will yet give thanks to him,
who is the help of my countenance, and my God.
(v. 6,7)
Friday at dinner on the Marietta Square with friend Susan, I could look back on the week's successes and laugh about many times when I'd been surprised by joy, warmth, inspiration. Kids enjoyed competing to define vocabulary words suggested by their classmates' cartoons. Kids shared poems and short personal essays they were proud of writing, every one containing at least one genuine surprise for me. The cast of MADAGASCAR, Jr. turned my simple idea for penguins' martial arts into something hilarious; and it was a joy to watch an improvisational dance duet between the Lion and Zebra, a fearless sixth grade boy and gracious eighth grade girl. My 7th grade drama class ran through their comedy sketches each afternoon with much eye-rolling, surreptitious whispering, and helpless giggling, so we all were surprised when parents and the art class laughed at all the right places in the performance. After the relief of that, even Friday afternoon carpool in the rain was fun, jocular interactions with parents through the windows of their vehicles.
The Lord grants his loving-kindness in the daytime;
in the night season his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life. (v. 10)
What do we thirst for, accepting that God is with us always? What's left to long for? The word "consummation" comes to mind, and "rest," an end to challenges. That's what I'm yearning for in pre-dawn traffic, worried that I won't get to the copy machine in time for the first class, when I recite to myself, "We praise you for your saints who have entered into joy; / May we also come to share in your heavenly kingdom" (Prayers of the People, Form III, Book of Common Prayer, p. 387). I just want to stop in a happy place, the Land of Rest in the hymn tune of the same name.
But eternal rest, an end to striving, is not what we really want. A character in Tom Stoppard's wonderful play Arcadia (blog 08/2007) asks what the point is, if all the answers are in the back of the book? Afterlife can't be the stopping place where there are no more questions or challenges, and that's not something we would could tolerate long. Stasis is not in the nature of God. Joy and love both spring from anticipation and desire (eros, in the non-erotic sense). Poet and essayist Christian Wiman writes that he
... doesn't go for the conventional idea of afterlife... for a beautifully simple reason: "Death is here to teach us something, or to make us fit for something" (105). It has to be final. He makes a strong case that life is change, and the popular idea of "life" eternal, self intact, but without choices, without suffering, without anything left to complete -- is a contradiction in terms. (Beyond Belief, blog 08/2013)
Rest is no good unless it follows yearning and challenge. After some rest, there's got to be more yearning, more challenge.
The cycle of longing, suffering, release, and more longing is expressed in Herbert Howells's choral setting of the King James translation, "Like as the hart desireth the water brooks, so longeth my soul after Thee" (listen here to St. John's College, Cambridge on YouTube). I've sung the anthem many times in church choir. We basses and tenors all longeth for a breath by the end of that first line. We strain to make it sound easy to blend on those sustained unison phrases. Howells' blue note for the accented syllable of "desireth," surprising in this context, gives the word an edge, a feeling that we're reaching for something and not quite getting there.
All voices sing forte on the question, "When shall I come to appear before God?" A quiet lament follows, "My tears have been my food day and night." Over the surging organ, voices sing fortissimo the words of the enemies who mock the Psalmist, "Where is now thy God?"
After that thundering climax, Howells' piece returns to its beginning, only now freshened by treble obligato and variations of the harmony that lean major instead of minor.
The same cycle is built into the complete Psalm 42, as well. After v. 10, there's another lament, more graphic than the first:
While my bones are being broken,
my enemies mock me to my face...
and say to me, "Where now is your God?" (v. 12-13)
Like Howells' music, the Psalm returns to an earlier question with renewed reassurance:
Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul,
and why are you so disquieted within me?
Put your trust in God,
for I will yet give thanks to him,
who is the help of my countenance, and my God.
(v. 14, 15)
Vacation comes up next week; then the challenges of a new semester that begins in the darkest days of the year. Then I'll come back to review what I just wrote; maybe it'll satisfy me. Probably not.
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