Sunday Morning Meds (Psalm 57)

My heart is steadfast, O God, 

my heart is steadfast; I will sing and make music.

 

I need to thank Garrison Keilor for drawing my attention to this verse of Psalm 57—not in so many words, but in spirit.  I need to thank him for reminding me in an interview in Christian Century that the Christian life begins in gratitude.  The source of faith itself may be elsewhere and certainly is mysterious, but gratitude is the starting block for what ye olde’ theologians call sanctification.  “I will sing and make music” is David’s brash pledge, his testimony of how he will live.  He says it because he knows God’s promises are sure, his faithfulness will ooze into all generations, and beyond, upward and forever outward into eternity itself.

 

Here’s what Garrison Keilor said: 

 

Thank you, Lord, for this amazing and bountiful life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for this laptop computer and for this yellow kitchen table and for the clock on the wall and the cup of coffee and the glasses on my nose and for these black slacks and this black T-shirt. . . .Thank you for the odd delight of being 60, part of which is the sheer relief of not being 50.

 

And then he said, “One should enumerate one's blessings and set them before the Lord.  Begin every day with this exercise.”

 

That’s exactly what I did for years as I began this blog, tried to begin each day with gratitude, making a discipline of thanksgiving.  Sometimes thanks comes easy as breath itself; sometimes it’s very hard work. I did it, slavishly, for more than a year.

What he said in that Christian Century interview grabbed me because I sometimes feel too much the curmudgeon as I crept into those supposedly blessed, therefore golden years.  A friend of mine once made the claim that the doctrine of sanctification—that believers, as they age, inch closer and closer to the Lord, to godliness—is really a myth.  “Most old guys I know,” he says, “are crotchety.” 

 And they are.  It’s an itch I’ve been scratching too much myself.   

 It all starts with praise, Keilor says:  “Gratitude is where the Christian life begins.”  We all ought to work at it, he reminds us.  “Begin every day with this exercise. . .”  That idea struck me as priceless, so that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do for almost a year.

But then, as I remember, in a committee meeting just a day after I wrote these words, I blew up, acted like a fool, shot my mouth off without a lick of restraint.  I’m no more an angel than I was last; maintaining gratitude with dawn’s early light hasn’t morphed me into some kind of saint.  You can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.   

 Which is not to say, however, that a daily regiment of thanksgiving was, for me, a waste of time.  Not at all.  I’m not as great a singer as the poet/king, but every morning I lift my voice and make my own kind of music, here in front of a screen in the corner of the basement.  And for that—for my music and the source of its energy and Garrison Keilor’s sweet reminder of something I’ve always known—for all of that, I’m thankful. 

Hear my song.