I WRITE this on a cloudy October afternoon in York, one of my favourite cities. This morning, I teamed up with my friend Roger Wagner, the artist and poet, to present the morning portion of a day on the Psalms, organised by the Church Times and our publisher, Canterbury Press.
Unbeknownst to each other, we had both been working on psalms projects during lockdown, Roger on his Book of Praises, a collection of fresh translations of some of the psalms illustrated and, indeed, illuminated by his beautiful art; and I on David’s Crown: a sequence of poems interlinked by shared last and first lines, so that the final line of the final poem — “Come to the place where every breath is praise” — was also the first line of the first poem, thus making a linked chaplet, or coronet, of poems: a sequence form called a “corona”, and pioneered by John Donne.
When we discovered, while both books were still in process, that we were both taking a deep dive into the Psalter, we found that we had a great deal in common in our approach. For both of us, the Psalter had taken on new depth and meaning and seemed more vital than ever, in the context of the pandemic and its attendant fears and anxieties, and especially in the radical changes, the reassessment of priorities, brought about by lockdown.
One of the psalms on which we both chose to focus this morning was Psalm 30, which seems, in the space of just 13 verses, to touch some of the heights and depths of that roller-coaster of emotion which we all experienced in 2020. Of course, it begins and ends in praise, opening with the words “I will magnify thee, O Lord,” and closing with, “Therefore shall every good man sing of thy praise without ceasing: O my God, I will give thanks unto thee for ever.”
But, in between, there are cries from the deep: “Thou, Lord, hast brought my soul out of hell,” and, of course, the golden phrase: “Heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning” — a verse I needed to hear over and over again in those dark times. My own response to the psalm went like this:
Exaltabo te, Domine
He gives us too, a voice to sing his praises,
So much the more because we were brought low
That we might know we have a God who raises
Up the lowly. Riches made us slow
To love you, slow to turn to you in praise
But sudden loss and crisis made us know
Our true dependence on your love. Our days
Of false security are gone. We fell
Into a pit of our own making. Raise
Us up again, each out of our own hell,
And give us oil for ashes, joy for mourning.
Restore us in your love and we will tell
Of how through our long night we heard your warning
And heeded you, and found your love again
How night withdrew and joy came in the morning.