PSALM 119: 109-112a

“BEYOND BELIEF”

“When beliefs deepen, entrenchment sets in,… searching wanes. When faith deepens, beliefs are destabilized,… searching waxes.” This is how John D. Caputo describes the difference between shallow religion and true spirituality.

When we become slaves to our religious convictions, who can free us? Faith liberates us to search more deeply than dogma. And it is faith that sings – sometimes subtly – between the lines of the psalms, sprouting up like green shoots through the asphalt layers of conventional theology.

Psalm 119 is well known as an “alphabetic acrostic” – each section opening with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. More important than this “outward form” is the psalm’s content: it is a hymn of praise about Torah – “Divine Teaching.”

But Psalm 119 also presents a subtle challenge. Divine law is foundational to our belief system and essential to our religion. And yet, within the Torah itself is an invitation to delve through belief, to transcend it, to live beyond its boundaries. Psalm 119 carefully lauds the safety of “law” and “instruction,” while insisting that divine love will transgress every law in order to crack open our hearts.

In my rendering of Psalm 119, verses 109-112a, I hope that you might hear the Torah’s radical invitation, to go beyond belief, beyond compliance, even beyond religion, into the transfiguring faithfulness of divine love.

PSALM 119: 109-112a

Does my life-pulse beat steady in my wrists?
Only in mindfulness of all you teach me.
Does hostility drag me into a trap of hate?
Only when I can’t step off the beaten path
of blind compliance to your command.
Do I feel at home, at the edge of everything,
witnessing your ever-here?
Only if thus I find my heart’s true happiness.
Is, then, my heart bent to you through laws of ever-doing?
Only if it also beats beyond the bounds of being.

(Rendered from the Hebrew by Henry Ralph Carse)