May 29th 2010    Tim Candler

    In my mind psalms are poems that mostly repress angst with words.   There will be those who disagree but in this heat I am way past caring.

    I would like to picture those who wrote The Psalms as bearded gardeners wandering the wilderness in search of caves and hermitage because chores, or insect life had become too heavy a burden.   But those who wrote The Psalms lived clean fingered and recumbent as often princes become, and occasionally they ventured forth with sword to smite neighbors, and if successful everyone called them clever.  The desolation row and electric guitar of their generation.  And no doubt still today the powerful, in private moments, curl up into cottons of why me, then find solace in oddball description, which then become public expressions of self importance.

   For so long God was the directional force, then amongst the fashionable it became Reason and for the less reverent it became The People, and sometimes I suspect these phases repeat in an endless spiral that will see us properly numbed to that point in time when we are the dinosaurs.  Which could be tomorrow.

    Not to fret though, because our bones are promised to a Potato patch, and should ever there by a curious wisdom at some future time they will find us fossilized amongst collections of Potato rocks, or perhaps pyramids, or something made of plastic that lasts for ever.   Clearly primitive psalm dependent culture, they will declare, as onward they stroll  into their own shadows.

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