Volume 3, Issue 6, June 1995


This Psalm Calls Us To Love

This psalm calls us to Love, and more singing even as it hovers,
slowly and sweetly, like frankincense.
Some say the psalm is sustenance,
like thick loaves.
Some say the psalm is virtuous like the clean, white Sabbath tablecloth.
But see how the psalm flies over the wine dark sea, where far below the Greek youths bob in their boats,
and imagine loves who have not been consecrated.
The psalm whisks over a body of water so turquoise that the men who sailed it developed the Philosophy of Beauty.
This psalm does not imagine it will have an ancient charm.
The psalm doesn't dream of Roman law.
The psalm rolls over sites that will one day be mosques and churches.
This psalm takes not the credit nor the blame.
This psalm weaves its way through the masonry, then disappears into the winding channels of the marketplace, before it can be interpreted.
This psalm emerges from behind the veil, launched as sound, encouraged by the fig-cut lips of our sleeping sister.
This psalm lands like a kiss of dried rock,
To be found by a child on the lips of discarded idols.
And, just after the Creation, beautiful animals, peacock and zebra,
fresh with their new names, allowed the psalm to move through their not yet familiar mouths;
And it passed over the trilling tongue of the hummingbird in its ruminative flight.
This psalm made the armadillo dance its bad but unselfconscious dance.
This psalm performed the daily wedding of Earth and Sky, and performed only one divorce: of beast from burden.
Say Yes to the psalm, for it is a psalm.
The psalm like a glance will not change direction in the middle.
This psalm calls us to love.
(Written by Norman Robert Doidge, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, essayist and poet, Toronto).

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.