Psalm 1

For my weekly quiet time this Sabbath, I studied Psalm 1.

I disagree with Psalm 1 if it is saying that a person's meditation on the Torah will lead to everything clicking in his life. Lately, I've been wondering, as I look back in retrospect: where did I get the idea that prayer and Bible study would lead inexorably to a good life? I mean, that was often my hope. On the first day of almost every school year, I would read my Bible and conduct a regiment of prayer, hoping that this would lead me to become a popular, successful person. Many people would recognize that holing oneself up in a dorm room, reading the Bible, was not a path to popularity. But I thought that, somehow, it would be.

Moreover, I've often assumed that believing the right doctrines would lead me to a better life. I was a fundamentalist, and I felt alienated from the liberal Christians around me, who had high status in the Christian community and in academia. And so I embraced liberal Christianity, but that only alienated the influential conservative Christians. I then became a fundamentalist again, expecting for God to lead me to a nice-looking Christian lady and to make me an influential winner of souls, as well as someone who could counsel other Christians with my wisdom of gold. But that didn't work, for even my fellow Christians thought that I was simply spouting a bunch of pious cliches.

Nowadays, I'm not sure what I am. There are people who probably believe that I spout cliches---only, this time, they are liberal or free-thinking cliches that people have undoubtedly heard elsewhere. My liberalism and spiritual burn-out most likely don't make me attractive to conservative Christian ladies, and liberal Christians are too socially conscious to listen to my complaining. I guess what I've found is that, insofar as I get along with people, it has little to do with what doctrines I happen to hold. Rather, it has to do with being friendly, with greeting people by name, and with being interested in what is going on in their lives. Having wit and wisdom goes a long way, too, but I don't have much of that, so I need to capitalize on what I can do rather than worry about what I can't do. Being friendly is a spiritual activity, in a sense, since I'm imitating God, who himself is friendly. But I'm not carrying around the hidden agenda of converting people to a set of doctrines, nor do I beat myself up when people don't like me (or, at least, I try not to do so), as if I need for people to like me in order to feel that my relationship with God is solid.

But where did I get the idea that prayer and Bible study would lead to a good life? From passages like Psalm 1, and also from other Christians, who talked about how God was blessing them in their lives. I still pray nowadays, because that helps me to cope. Do I meditate on the Bible? In a sense, but, to be honest, thinking about the dark passages of the Bible (blood, judgment, wrath, etc.) does not exactly make me happy. What I try to do is meditate on good principles---valuing all people as human beings, not judging others, etc.---without making the perfect the enemy of the good (i.e., saying that I have to be friends with all people and have warm feelings toward them).

In addition, I'm not exactly binary in my thinking, as is the author of Psalm 1, who divides the world into good people and evil people. I think that life is much more complex than that, and that all of us have a mixture of good and evil within us. I read and heard Christian commenters who concluded from Psalm 1 that the wicked are "worthless," and that God pays intimate attention to the deeds of the righteous, while the deeds of the wicked will perish. But I try not to believe that any human being on the face of the earth is "worthless," as if good deeds make a person valuable, whereas a lack of good deeds or the presence of bad deeds depreciates a person's innate value. How could I love anybody if I carried around that attitude within me? My opinion is that God loves everyone and hopes that all people will do the right thing.

I listened to a sermon by David Hocking called "The Problem of Counsel" (click here to access it). I both liked and disliked it. What I liked was that he encouraged us not to put ourselves on some spiritual hill-top when we are counseling people, but rather to realize that we, too, could make the same mistakes that others make. This is the opposite of a binary sort of thinking that separates the world into good and bad people, for it recognizes that we are all weak, and yet capable of good things.

But I disliked how Hawking was telling us that we can only see a therapist who is a Christian. I disagree with this as a blanket-rule, for non-Christians have wisdom about how we should treat people---what works, what doesn't work, what is right, what is wrong. As long as non-Christian therapists are not hostile to religion and do not encourage worldliness (i.e., I heard of one therapist who counseled a husband and a wife to date other people, which I deem to be inappropriate), then I can work with them as a Christian believer (or whatever kind of believer I am these days). Psalm 1 appears to assume that one is either a pious God-fearer or a reprobate human being. That may have been the experience of that Psalm's author, but it's not my experience.

And yet, Psalm 1 has wisdom, which isn't surprising, as it's been labelled a "wisdom Psalm" by scholars. Like Psalm 1, even non-Christian institutions and psychologists tell us that we should cultivate good influences in our life---people, places, and things that encourage us to do good rather than bad. Their motive for saying this is not really religious, but simply that they recognize that doing bad can cause damage---to oneself, to others, and to society. In a sense, the world does run according to a certain order, as wisdom literature teaches us. And yet, that order is not an absolute, to recall the views of Qoheleth.