It's difficult to imagine any reader out there who has five minutes to listen to Psalm 32, but go ahead and click on the above--it's not required listening, and it's the original lyric. It's what I remember, and what I remembered on Sunday last.
Our preacher, Rev. Van Someren, used to hand out mimeographed legal sheets full of psalms for us to recite each week. I don't know if he thought memorizing the catechism was too simple a task, but those long sheets were full of the intense religiosity the psalms offer and I can't forget. Always the psalms, too, just the psalms, some of them even Genevan.
I don't doubt that on some week back then Psalm 32 was the required text, but what came back to me on the Sabbath was not memorization but rendition. Strangely enough, it wasn't the preacher who made a sudden, unexpected appearance, it was his wife, Mrs. Van Someren, a tall woman, lanky and strong, a woman in tin-rims--the old-fashioned kind--that set on a face whose angles were far more sharp and defined than her personality, her hair forever pinned, not loose. Were she Catholic, she might have looked like one of sisters that shouldn't be crossed, a middle-school math teacher maybe, handy with the ruler she kept on top of her desk at the front of the room.
But she wasn't that, not at all. Last Sunday, she made an appearance somewhere near me in a pew in the old church downtown, the one our congregation abandoned when we built a new one a block south of where our family lived. The clarity of the unbidden memory was amazing. I didn't just see her singing Psalm 32, I saw her heart sing. She was praising God, being carried along by the richness of an old tune and its familiar but profound lyrics.
How blessed is he whose trespass
Has freely been forgiven,
Whose sin is wholly covered
Before the sight of heaven.
Blest he to whom Jehovah
Shall not impute his sin,
Who have a guileless spirit,
Whose heart is true within.
My mother the soloist used to commend Mrs. Van Someren's singing voice because my mother loved to see people project, loved to see people sing the way she did, with meaning and soul and excitement; but Mom the musician couldn't help telling us that Mrs. Van Someren was, rather painfully, too regularly a half-note flat. I thought of that too in church on Sunday, when Mrs. Van Someren was singing.
Here's verse two:
While I kept guilty silence
My strength was spent with grief.
Thy hand was steady on me,
My soul found no relief.
I was sixty-some years in my own past, transported by an unbidden memory. When I riffle through those verses now, I can't help but think that being unforgiven may well have played in a role in that whole memory. I wasn't a nice boy--is anyone? I wasn't delinquent, but I was capable of thoughts and actions I knew very well weren't cherubic, weren't on the clearly posted list of parentally approved behaviors.
But when I owned my trespass
My sin hid not from thee,
When I confessed transgression,
Then thou forgav'st me.
Musically, the bass line in the second half of each verse reaches up to b, a stretch for me. But when it does, it somehow makes the lyrics more plaintiff, more fraught with sadness, even horror. To scrub one's way to forgiveness requires the stern cleansing that most of us--and me, too, I guess, even back then--would do anything to avoid.
Two days ago, in church, was that Psalm 32 unearthing some childhood carnality?--I was nine, I think, when we left the old church. I doubt it. Besides, although that old psalm is all about guilt and sin, that's not what I saw in the proud and even happy face of the pastor's wife. It wasn't my sin, but her joy.
Then in the Lord be joyful,
In song lift up your voice;
Be glad in God, ye righteous,
Rejoice, ye saints, rejoice.
That's it.
The Van Somerens left our church sometime before I went off to high school. On occasion I'd see them, very infrequently. I can't say her husband is some kind of spiritual mainstay in my life. I used to despise his preacher's hands, so white and thin, so sadly unused in a congregation full of farmers and carpenters. But he was a good man, warm-hearted, loving, but maybe a B- from the pulpit. The Mrs. died just last summer, I'm told.
Her presence--her witness--appearing as she did in that treasured old psalm, was not only remarkable but stirring. She wasn't trying to lead the choir or cheer the troops. What her face registered was the immensity of having been forgiven. Far more than she herself would ever admit I'm sure, she was, for a moment right there before me, a saint.
It's difficult not to believe that the visitation of such long-lost events--both the beauty of Mrs. Van Someren's singing, and the odd memory of my dad's mimicking a neon sign on a butcher shop come more readily to us as we age, maybe because there's just plain less room for more in whatever chest of memories each of us has tucked away somewhere amid the synopses. When there's less of a future than there's ever been, and when today often seems a jumble, at least we can find some modicum of comfort in the past, both in memories that run when we want them to and those that simply appear of their own volition.
When I think of all those children of war and how their memories will forever carry remnant acts and tribulations, I can't help but be thankful that as I move farther and farther into old age, I won't be visited by horrors. I'll have my dad's old jokes and the elegant testimony of Mrs. Van Someren's Psalm 32--okay, like all of ours, maybe a half-note flat.
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