The Psalms literally stop us in our tracks.  We have been walking our own way, the way of the world, the way of the wicked (v. 1).  We have treated the world like a spectator sport where our sofa becomes the seat of judgment (v. 2).  The psalms are an invitation to know God and to know ourselves, and thus an invitation to pray.  Here in Psalm 1, we receive this invitation not as a list of things to do but as a cease and desist order.  Stop walking, stop standing, stop sitting. Stop talking and listen.  The law of the Lord is heeded only as it is received as a sabbath of hearing.

Hear the words of the Lord, hear how his ways are so different than the acquisitive, reductive ways of the world.  Hear and find joy.

The verbs for the righteous are deceptively passive:  delight, meditate, be planted.  I mean how do you delight in something?  Do you think about it really hard?  But this is the paradox of prayer.  Prayer is not first a speaking, but a hearing.  God’s initial speech in Genesis 1, “Let there be light,” bathes the whole of creation in the illuminating grace of God. It’s in response to the world-creating words of the Lord that we speak, that we pray.  Like babies copying the sounds and syllables of their parents, we learn to speak in listening. In hearing ourselves addressed by God, we can turn from the ways of sinners. We can repent. In hearing the Law of the Lord we are initiated into the customs and cultures of a new world. In hearing the Law of the Lord we are planted in the well-watered sunlight of the love of God.

Psalm 1 invites us to listen, to hear and to pray. Prayer is the grounds of grace, the fertile soil of new life where our lives stand tall in the love of God in every season.  Psalm 1 initiates us into the rhythms of the psalter, into living, real living.  Our lives are only truly alive when we are alive to God and thus the psalm 1 invites us to rest in the grace of God.

Verse for meditation:   They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper (v.3).

This site is dedicated to the tension of life- the dissonance between already and not yet, between eternal bliss and daily monotony, between the dignifying words of God and the dehumanizing slogans of life, between the suspiciously sacred and the supposedly secular.   Emily Dickinson, recluse prophetess-poet, was a master at weaving life and possibility out of this tension.  In her poem no. 5, the last stanza declares:

In a serener Bright,
In a more golden light
I see
Each little doubt and fear,
Each little discord here
Removed.

The Scriptures, the holy words recorded in Old and New Testament will be our prism as we allow them to refract the revelation of Father, Spirit, and Son into every corner of our world.  The Scriptures tell stories—stories about life, family, beauty, and loss.  These stories all coalesce into a single story of God revealing himself in the ordinary lives of women and men.  In this space, I will endeavor to follow a similar arc.  I want to invite you to see where all these disparate “parts” of our lives find congruence, living, moving, and having their being in Christ Jesus.   But mostly I pray that the one who spoke the creation into being will spark life in the very core of who you are, inviting you to find yourself addressed and embraced as a daughter, a son of God.