The Book of Psalms
Well-Being I won
And Wisdom, too.
I grew and took joy in my growth:
From a word to a word
I was led to the word,
From a deed to another deed.
—The Poetic Edda, (circa 1200 AD)
In the Beginning
1 It was hard at first, the lessons God taught him.
Like a warrior without a sword, he was
without words. There was nothing he could do.
He was a young man—a boy really—who
wanted, more than anything, to be a poet.
God said, That’s fine: give me back the talent.
This is the way it is if you love me.
Give it back. No Questions. Faith it.
The young man gave back the talent. God said,
Good. I’ll make you a living epistle.
Isn’t this the way God is, always lifting things
to metaphor. The kid wanted to be a poet
but a living epistle sounded neat. He liked
the way God talked—like a poet!—so he
agreed. He didn’t know what he was in for.
The Twenties were the worst. The Teachable
Twenties, God called it. That’s when God beat
the shit out of you for ten years. Then the Tireless
Thirties when you put into practice what you
learned; then the Fiery Forties when the passion
kicks in; and so on God went, naming the decades
in simple terms like the way God does when
in Teacher mode. But The Twenties were
the worst. God went on about Potters
and Clay and the kid wound up in pieces,
his mind here, his heart there, his soul a pile
of shards on God’s floor. God saw it was Good,
swept up the kid, put him in a bowl of tears
until he dissolved into mud. From the kid’s
point of view, it was horrible. His mind was mush.
It was worse than his worst trip on acid.
All he wanted was chocolate bars, the pain
was so bad. Then the shaping began—God’s
Hands all over him, around his heart, between
his legs, painful and sweet, so...intimate,
God’s hands on his body—molding, shaping.
Then came The Fire. We won’t even talk
about The Fire. Some things are Mysteries.
God has a reputation to maintain.
When it was over God breathed into him
seven times. Seven because that’s the way
God does it when it has to be perfect.
The boy woke up, a young man. He spoke of
many things in parables and rhymes. He
was just beginning to learn his lessons.
2 Blank. Empty. Clean. That's what he felt like:
Blank Slate. Empty Vessel. A Clean Whistle
for God to blow through—a wind instrument
for God to play on—a vessel to fill—
a slate to write on—it was exhausting
going back and forth between images
without sinking—like walking on water—
like Jesus—vessel-wine , slate-word—STOP, STOP!—
he shouted—you're making me crazy!
Isn't this the way it is‚ being pushed
to the edge—then over the edge—
then the spill, the stain, the vessel broken,
the tears. God likes it when the soul leaks out:
it softens things into shaping, and molding.
As they say in the trade, God has Good Hands.
But the vessel broken says, NO WAY!
Put me back together the way I was
Go get some Crazy Glue! God laughs, cries, waits
and waits. God's good at waiting. And guess what?
God never uses Crazy Glue; never
puts things back the way they were. Never.
3 Back to the young man. (God has a way of
taking center stage.) He's running around
with his head cut off, so his friends say.
They can't understand him. It's like he says
the word Grapefruit but they hear Armadillo.
They make circular motions with their index
fingers just beyond their ears to indicate
the mental state that they think he is in.
Damn! they say. What's got hold of you? Shit! Fuck!
He looks up expecting a lightning bolt.
God is not offended by the language.
This is the first lesson he learns.
4 God rolls up the sleeves, gets right into him.
The clay is fine, spanking new. But the mind—
there's all this bad software to delete. God!
God says (not in vain), What have they done! Who
fucked with my programming? Shit! Damn!
(God gets into language when pissed.) Meanwhile...
Church, State, School, and Home run
for cover. They know who's responsible.
God's looking up the appropriate verses:
I will whet my glittering sword. I will
make mine arrows drunk with blood—God's so pissed—
can't decide which weapon. There's Hell to pay.
The young man is temporarily insane
with God's Fingers in his cerebral
cortex trying to set it straight again.
This takes seven months. For God, it's a blink.
For the young man, it's eternity. He's
in agony. There's hell to pay.
He looks in the mirror: sees a stranger.
He walks in front of traffic: an angel
intervenes. He doesn't know where Home is.
He doesn't know his left from his right. He
doesn't know how to go out or come in.
He mixes them up backwards.
He goes in the Out doors: tuO, they say.
He comes out the In doors: nI, they say.
He buys many chocolate bars.
5 He doesn't know it but he's having what
mystics call Epiphanies. (Too bad he
can't enjoy them. All those pictures of saints
in ecstasy? Not untrue; just not the
whole picture. Good editing on God's part—
Good PR for recruiting purposes.)
He sees spirits everywhere: inside in
the woodwork, wallpaper, linoleum;
outside in trees, pavement, sides of buildings.
They look frozen, trapped. They don't look happy.
Their eyes bug out. He wonders, Can they see him?
Their mouths are open wide as if screaming.
He wonders how they got there.
Is he next?
These aren't the visions he expected.
6 It's around this time The Elders come.
They are dressed in funny clothing—the style
is wrong—off a generation or two.
He entertains them: they might be angels
lost in Time. He feels sorry for them
because of the clothing: it blows their cover.
He's having fun.
These elders are not like his elders
(parents, teachers, authority figures)
who keep telling him not to waste his mind.
These elders say a mind is a good thing
to waste. Who needs it? Put on God's Mind.
The kid does—puts on God's Mind like a hat,
(this is in the days before virtual
reality) and hears all sorts of things
that confirm his wildest dreams:
Leave the church. Quit your job. Drop out of school.
Simple moral imperatives.
These orders were easy. Not like his elders:
Cut your hair, Go to school, Get a job, and
if you didn't, the big one: I WANT YOU!
He wondered about them—his elders, that is—
why they always spoke in three syllables:
Don't jerk off, Wash your hands, Go to church.
Were they mentally challenged?
Did God make them that way to test him?
7 But where to go? What to do? That was easy:
God's Hat told him: clean out your bank account,
buy reefer, distribute it to the poor
college students. (Parable updated.)
God said they were in the worst shape:
they were Dead. They needed Awakening.
Just as they were getting high on reefer,
God calls in the police. (God is always
calling on the shadiest characters
to do the dirty work. Can't let on who's
responsible—can't blow the cover:
God has a reputation to maintain.)
8 They bust the students and bust their heads.
It's great—Blood is everywhere! The students
wake up vomiting Descartes, fists clenching
the air, shouting: I BLEED—THEREFORE, I AM!
God loves Blood. It Speaks. There's nothing like it.
I BLEED—THEREFORE, I AM: Nice touch, God says.
Good. Very Good. God rolls up the sleeves and
fires the Kiln. They were ready for shaping,
molding. I'll have them burning in no time,
God says, thinking biblical thoughts like Burn!—
Babylon, Burn; poetical thoughts like
And righteousness will come down like the rain;
revolutionary thoughts like, I will
overturn overturn overturn them.
God is so excited—things haven't been
this fun in many a generation.
There are all these old scores to settle and
these kids seem like just the ones to do it.
They have Faith—they leap to conclusions.
They have Visions—they eat their mushrooms.
They are Holy—they even wear Levi's.
They tell their rulers, Fuck Off! Eat Shit!
without prompting. God really likes that.
The Old Prophets were sure hard to work with—
had to be scared by angels, whales, lions
before they would do the right thing, and they
always required a sign from heaven.
Not these kids. They jump right in the gap. BAMN!
they chant—BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY!
BAMN, God laughs. They even mis-spell right.
9 It's about this time the fasting kicks in.
Things get serious. The party's over.
Where do I go from here? he asks.
No Answer. He asks again. No Answer.
The Journey
10 Where do you go when the bridges are burned?
Church, School, Friends, Home—
His past a husk—an empty shell; his wings
too wet to fly though fly he must—
he wings it on faith—
Falls.
How do you take back words? How do you break a vow?
Words. Words! In the beginning
so sweet to taste, now so bitter to digest—
he was having to eat his words,
Walk his Talk. No rest.
No Rest.
Home—he couldn't go there. Home
is where when you have to go there. . .
Home is where the heart. . .
Homecoming. . .
Alone. Ravaged. A wilderness,
inside. He wanders
where he wills, though not his will,
he laughs, bitterly.
God is an acquired taste, he laughs—
Bitterly.
Walking, he finds himself Everywhere
at once. And No Where. Now Here.
At Once. Everywhere.
You wanted Home? This was Home. This was Crazy.
This was The Center where God hung out,
hanging Everything on Nothing
with nothing but Words and
Spit—
Caught in the cleft of the rock
when the rock was struck
the rod came down again
and he became water—a stain on God's carpet.
Or was he a shard of rock on God's floor?
One metaphor was as good as another.
There was no ending or beginning. There was
No Escape.
The Bridge
11 He saw everything: not a detail
was missed. Events bleeding
and blending into each other in almost
but not quite the same circumstances.
He was like an ambassador between dimensions;
like being in many plays at once, happening
at the same time in different spaces—sets, if you will—
and he would Be-There, leaving to Faith the timing
of the entry, his lines to read, the reaction,
the response of the other characters
and his response to them.
It took a lot of Grace to make decisions.
Sometimes he didn't know what to do
or did, but changed his mind.
This caused much grumbling among the angels,
and often, this is when Accidents Happened
that shouldn't have: a car wreck; a fire;
the inevitable souls that needed re-orienting
or re-occidenting, depending on where they came from,
or more to the point, their destination.
The cries from loved ones, How could you do this!
Why did it happen?
The spirits sent out to make it work out in Time
which sometimes took decades.
From Eternity all Timelines were happening at once.
Letter from God's Country
12 What I'm going through cuts the heart's core:
It's opposite the verse about home being the place
when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
It's the place when you find yourself there,
you know you've been abandoned.
It's where Faith flees and Doubt, an occasional visitor,
announces it's moving in with all its baggage.
But this is nothing compared to the real
Terror. That's when your soul knocks down Heaven's
Door in a last desperate attempt for
Clarity, Sanity, Mercy—anything
but this place where you are where Nothing is—
and there's God having tea with the devil,
discussing You.
You see, you really weren't expected
to make it this far, this close, but you did.
Now you Know. This is what it means,
Then shall we know, even as we are known.
We are God's kids: the ones filled with crazylove.
We're like those wind-up toys that, when set down,
go straight for the edges, cliffs and borders
where the action is; where the danger is.
And God, being God, can't resist showing
us off to whomever stops by for a chat.
God is a proud MamaPapa. Watch this—
Your car is stolen; the check never arrives;
You lose your job; your lover leaves; your pet dies.
Time to pray. But God's on holiday
in the master suite of a swank hotel
sipping Free Will, watching you on cable,
not knowing—really not knowing—the outcome.
Abandonment is the surest sign God loves you.
— Richard Cambridge
Author’s note. “The Book of Psalms” is the first chapter in PULSA—A Book of Books, (Hanover Press, 2006).