Psalm 1
1 Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked
or take the path that sinners tread or sit in the seat of scoffers,
2 but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.
3 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.
4 The wicked are not so but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous,
6 for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
A reflection:
The first word of this reading is happy. But the ancients didn’t consider happiness to mean warmth and comfort, the way we do, just as they didn’t consider shalom or peace to mean the absence of conflict. The Hebrew word for happy means to go straight, to advance along the right path. So the psalmist is saying we’ll develop as good spiritual people, we’ll grow in life, if we don’t follow the wicked. We’ll still have problems, but we’ll grow into better humans. Also, when the psalmist says to meditate on God’s law day and night, s/he doesn’t mean to concentrate mentally on the Ten Commandments. The meaning is more like speak or plot about all of God’s guidance day and night. All of the teachings in scripture are to make us wonder, converse, debate, and even employ in our daily lives God’s message to us. This meditate then is more of a call for putting things into practice, not just mental ruminating.
Doesn’t this psalm echo Jesus’s words this week about loving God and loving the neighbor? Don’t just have a warm feeling in your heart. Put that love into action that will contribute to flourishing! Don’t just care about the people around you with fondness – we have treated them the way a nurse treats her own children, says Paul this week. Arrange your life in such a way as to be acting out, demonstrating the teaching and the love of God to everyone around you, because you have grown straight, advanced along the right path in life, not been drawn astray by people who do wicked things.
If I might, for just this paragraph, comment on a daily occurrence: so much of what I see in the news each day highlights the wickedness of people in power, of criminals in cities, of good people failing to notice that something is wrong until it’s too late and a fire or a collision or an injury results. News reports can be instructive of course. And we are not the proverbial ostriches who bury their heads in the sand. But if we limit (not eliminate, perhaps) our time on these broadcasts, and use that now freed-up time to enact whatever word or guidance from God we have heard recently, figuring out how to embody it in our neighborhood, I think I can promise it will be time better spent. And I don’t know about you, but at my age I want to make the most bountiful use of my time. It is a gift not to be squandered and certainly not to be spent on getting mired in shame at our present national circumstances or sorrow at other people’s misfortune. We have better work to do than that. Let us go straight, advancing on the right path: be happy.
A prayer:
Lord God, thank you for loving us. Thank you for changing your own divine life to include and encompass us, your short-attention-spanned creatures. Help us to pay attention to our attention, and help us to keep The Main Thing the main thing: your guidance to us, embodied in our world. Amen.
