Sunday Morning Meds--"To be blessed"

Blessed is he. . .whose delight is in the law of the Lord, Psalm 1

Apparently, there’s some question about the first word of the book of the Psalms. There’s little question about the word itself, of course; it’s “blessed,” at least in most translations.

The long-standing question about the word is grammatical. Is blessed, as used in Psalm 1:1, an adjective or a noun? Does the word describe a condition, or is it a condition its own right?

I taught English my whole professional life, but on this one I don’t have a clue. I like the question however. It’s clearly a win/win. Is blessedness an attribute—as in “hers is a truly blessed life”— or a condition—as in “he is blessed"?

This poem from the Writers Almanac is titled, simply enough, "The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog," and the poet is Alicia Suskind Ostryker, who someone once called "America's most fiercely honest poet." (Keep that in mind.)

To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God's love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow

I'm not at all sure what to make of that metaphor, but it is at the very least memorable--"milk washing through a cow"? Ms. Ostryker was born and reared in Brooklyn, but she's pushing ninety years old and not a dummy. Besides, she took a Ph.D. from the University of the Dairy State, that's right--Wisconsin. She should know milk doesn't just wash through a cow, right? Note, however, that the milkmaid's odd metaphor-making comes in answer to the same question that rises from Psalm 1--that blessedness follows, oddly enough, from a diligent life, and that her answer clearly and vividly asserts that the milk is "God's love."

There's more.

To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended
skirt

There's a pattern here. She's taking the personae of a few unlikely subjects and allowing them to talk about what it means to be blessed. The dark red tulip could well hail from Orange City, but then again probably not, given her "slug of lust" and that "up-ended skirt." 

But, you get the pattern. Both the aging milkmaid and the dark red tulip define blessedness by their task, their calling. 

And one more.

To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other dogs
can smell it

Okay. "America's most fiercely honest poet" won't let anything escape testimony, so for her final stanza she asks a dog, a generic dog, who answers her question by referencing that abominable behavior common to all dogs, the means by which their snouts identify each other. To be blessed, that mutt says, is to have a pinch of God within you that's both unique and accessible, to have one's own identity.

Okay, it's not Psalm 1. About that there is no dispute. Maybe it helps to describe Alicia Suskin Ostriker as a Jewish feminist, because she is. To be blessed, say a milkmaid, a tulip, and a generic dog with "a pinch of God" is to be what you are, to know it and to be it. Psalm 1 says to be blessed means to "take delight in the law of the Lord." 

Can someone who is not true to him or herself "take delight in the law of the Lord?"

Hmmm. Maybe Alicia Suskin Ostriker--and her curious witnesses--isn't all that far afield. It's not out of the question.