The immediacy and passion of the Psalms makes them ever freshly appealing.
Reading Psalm 83 just this morning, the following lines started out from the page:
“…they are happy whose strength is in You,
In whose hearts are the roads to Sion.
As they go through the Bitter Valley
They make it a place of springs …”
I am sure we all know these people – people who pass often unobtrusively through the bitter valley that is this life, making it a place of springs for those around them.
Two of those people indeed were sitting next to me as I read. The Psalmist obviously knew them too, those people who seem able to lighten the burdens of our lives just with a word, a touch, an understanding smile, an offer to help, an offer to pray for or with.
This psalm is full of exquisite longing for heaven, for dwelling with God in His house, where one day is better than a thousand elsewhere.
Yet it is deeply aware also of the place of humankind in the world, the necessity to pass through earthly life doing what we can to make fertile with the springs of charity the hard and dry world we live in, so that our lives and the lives of others might bear fruit even in the Godless desert that this world can sometimes seem to be.
The Psalmist understands all too well what that feels like, and what a supreme challenge it is.
The Jews were also a group of religious believers with a well defined and cohesive faith, fundamentally at odds in many ways with the pagan world in which they perforce found themselves (often through their own unfaithfulness).
Yet then, as now, those who keep their eyes on the prize of eternal happiness with God are the happy ones, no matter what society they live in.
They are the ones who go through their earthly lives making life better for everyone around them, ameliorating the bitterness of the valley of tears with their inner happiness, their sweetness, their strength, their willingness to support, to listen, to help, to advise.
They aren’t necessarily the strongest, the youngest, the most beautiful, the smartest.
They are just the faithful ones, the ones who see Christ in all people, and seek to serve people in any way they can in answer to Our Lord’s dictum that whatsoever we do to others, we do also to Him.
The freshness and truth of these ancient Psalms is a reminder that our Catholic faith is fundamentally simple, it is deeply attuned to the human heart and the human psyche, it is full of primal emotion and passion as well as intellectual rigour and profound philosophy.
The event we are looking forward to on December 25, the culmination of the momentous Incarnation celebrated nine months earlier on March 25, is a poignant reminder of the profound immediacy, the simplicity and the heartrending appeal to our humanity that is our faith, made manifest in the humility of God made Man.