I memorized Psalm 108 sixty years ago. It was the job that did it. It was a summer job, working for the town of Kalispell, the town in which I had grown up and was now getting ready to leave. High-school graduation was behind me, and university ahead. In three months I would board the Great Northern Railroad and head out for Seattle.
A single sentence got me started: “I will awake the dawn.” My job for the town that summer was in the Department of Street Maintenance. When the town was platted and laid out, all the residential streets were lined with Norway maples, with an occasional cottonwood thrown in. As U.S. Highway 93 entered the town limits from the south, it became Main Street, bisecting the town. A wide grassy boulevard divided Main Street down the middle. After four city blocks, the boulevard expanded into a park at the center of which was the county courthouse. The road split into one-way streets, north and south, that curved around the park, and then came together again, still divided by the boulevard for another four blocks, at which point asphalt and cement replaced the grass. The Norway maples gave way to Wheeler’s Jewelry and the Conrad Bank, the Woolworth five-and-dime and Montgomery Ward, the Jordan Café, and Stockman’s Saloon.
It made for a welcoming entrance to our town, and I was always proud of it. Unlike many western towns that have the appearance of being as unplanned as a teenage pregnancy, our wide streets, ample boulevards, and generous plantings of trees showed every sign of being the result of a thoughtful and affectionate courtship between the first settlers and the land.
My job that summer was watering those grassy, tree-studded boulevards. My workday began in the middle of the night. I started at eleven o’clock so that the bulk of my work would be done while there was a minimum of traffic. With the help of an alarm clock, I would get out of bed and be out on the street, watering the grass and trees. After six hours of working in the dark, I would begin anticipating the arrival of daylight. Some nights dragged on endlessly—would the sun ever come up? “Come on, you old lazy bones sun! Wake up!”
On one of those slow-arriving mornings, a sentence in the psalm came to mind: “I will awake the dawn!” My mind expanded exponentially. The mindless, repetitive work left plenty of room for the free play of my imagination. From the modest responsibility of keeping the grass a welcoming green through a mostly rainless summer, I found myself responsible for praying the sun up and over the mountains.
The wake-up call expanded into a workplace reflection on the entire psalm that occupied those summer nights and dawns. I had begun using the psalm for whimsical amusement, but as scripture so often does, it soon took over, and I found it using me. It wove a kind of valedictory meditation through those summer days of transition from the familiar streets on which I had grown up to the world beyond—to a university campus to begin with, then to whatever places and kinds of work that would come after that.
Three wake-up phrases bunched together at the psalm’s opening: “Awake my soul”…“Awake, O harp and lyre”…and “I will awake the dawn.” Was I awake? Truly awake? I had my eyes open; I was going through the motions of my work. But was I God-awake? Was my soul awake? If I was really awake, I would be doing more than watering that grass, I would be thanking and praising and singing. That’s what wide-awake people do:
I will give thanks to thee, O Lord, among the peoples
I will sing praises to thee among the nations.
For thy steadfast love is great above the heavens,
Thy faithfulness reaches to the clouds.
I felt like I had those summer nights all to myself. It was my first extended immersion in silence and solitude. The whole town asleep and I alone awake, alive and alert to the movements of the summer constellations, steadfast love and faithfulness resonating through the phases of the moon, rising on the incense of the fragrant night air. There is something about getting up and going out in the middle of the night that gives you an edge on the rest of the world.
The monks know what they are doing when they get up at two in the morning to pray Lauds, the first office of the day. All summer long I kept vigil, took lessons in being a monk, present to hear the first birdsong, catch the first hint of light coming up from behind the Swan Range of the Rocky Mountains.
I never became a monk, but I got a feel for it that summer.
Wakefulness is the first thing. All the great spiritual teachers tell us that. Awake my soul.
But that kind of thing is just a little too good to last, and it didn’t last long on the late night streets of Kalispell.
I watered my grassy boulevards with a fire hose. I had thirty yards of hose wrapped around a reel that was attached to a huge wooden cart. I would attach the end of the hose to a fire hydrant, unreel it to its full length, then play the sprinkling nozzle back and forth across the grass. Whenever I was watering the median strip or the boulevard on the opposite side of the street from the hydrant, my hose would be exposed in the street. I had a little sandwich-board sign that I propped in the middle of the road a hundred yards or so in either direction from where I was working, warning vehicles to slow down. When they read my sign and heeded it, I had plenty of time to get my hose out of the road and let them go through.
But not everyone honored my sign. Mostly it was the truckers who ignored it. They would roar into my silence, and I would dive to the curbside for safety, leaving my hose behind. Then they would hit it—those huge steel juggernauts, logging trucks and eighteen-wheelers—and the hose would spring leaks in three or four places. It was an old hose, donated to the town from the fire department when it was no longer fit for the serious work of firefighting. It couldn’t stand much abuse. I would run to the fire hydrant, turn off the water, and spend the next hour or so repairing the leaks.
This didn’t happen every night. Several nights would pass without incident. Then it would happen again. I would be meditating, relaxed and attentive in the stillness, at ease in the rhythms of my work, awake to God, praying
Be exalted, O God, above the heavens,
Let thy glory be over all the earth,
and then without warning one of these apocalyptic machines would be upon me, and my prayer would shift gears to
That thy beloved may be delivered,
Give help by thy right hand, and answer me!
I never got used to the intrusions. The night always seemed so large with God; my work always felt so fitting, so appropriate, so congenial. For it wasn’t long into the summer that I was feeling quite proprietary about those streets and grassy boulevards. My mother had been born in this town only fifteen years after it had been established. My immigrant grandfather, who died before I was born, had laid out the first cement sidewalks. The homes of my several aunts and uncles were safe houses through my growing-up years. There was hardly a street corner that was not signposted by the memory of a fistfight…or an infatuation. This was my town, and I had this wonderful summer of nights to touch and smell and tend it. My appreciation was deepened by the sense of my approaching departure.
As the summer unfolded, Psalm 108 continued to guide me in praying my experience of this place. One night about halfway through the summer—it was early July—I noticed that halfway through the psalm the subject changed from me to God. The first half of the psalm is all I and me: “My heart is ready, O God my heart is ready…awake my soul…I will awake the dawn…answer me.” “I” and “me,” nine times. I loved that. I was given a grammar in which I could express myself in my surroundings with a vocabulary tailor-made to my experience. I’m sure that is why I liked it so much. I was an eighteen-year-old adolescent, full of myself, full of my town. I loved saying “I” and “me.” I still do.
Then, abruptly, without a transition, God is speaking:
God has promised in his sanctuary,
“With exultation I will divide up Shechem,
and portion out the Vale of Succoth.
Gilead is mine; Manasseh is mine;
Ephraim is my helmet;
Judah my scepter.
Moab is my washbasin;
upon Edom I cast my shoe;
over Philistia I shout in triumph.”
This is “Promised Land” language: I will divide up…I will portion out. When Israel entered the land promised to them by God, the tribes assembled at Shechem, the geographical center, and each was assigned its portion, its God-promised place. Life always occurs in place. It is never an abstraction, never a generality. Place: Sinai, Galilee, Bethany. Place: Kalispell, Kila, Creston, Somers, Bigfork. Holy lands, holy places.
As the grass was soaking up the water, I was soaking up the place, relishing it not simply as my place but God’s place.
Poets characteristically love place names. But whoever it was that laid out my town was not a poet. The landscaping of parks and trees was generous, but all the streets and avenues were numbered: 1, 2, 3, 4…The only street in the core town that had a name was Main Street and there is precious little poetry in that, especially after Sinclair Lewis had finished with it.
So I took it upon myself to christen the streets with names worthy of their significance in my life. I didn’t go so far as to cross out the numbered street signs and spray paint them with proper names, but I said them night after night: Shechem, Succoth, Gilead, Manasseh, Ephraim, Judah…and Shiloh, Beersheba, Shunem, Cana, Chorazin, Gaza, Jezreel, Ziklag, Gezer. I had learned to walk and talk, played, gone to school, made friends, sinned and repented, read and prayed and loved, on holy ground. This land had been portioned out by God, not primarily for farming and mining and logging, but for living out all the complexities of eternal life on this earth—salvation life. A holy land requires proper names to evoke its character. Numbers don’t do it. The naming became a whimsical exercise in sanctifying the ground I had grown up on, The Holy Land.
There are nine place names in the list of holy places that God divided up and portioned out, but I didn’t find much personal use for the last three. Moab, Edom, and Philistia were enemies, and I didn’t have a very strong sense of enemy in those days. The closest thing to an enemy for me was a rival school’s athletes in the next valley.
Except for those trucks, those bully trucks hurtling out of the darkness and puncturing my fire hose. I would yell out after them, “Moabite! Edomite! Philistine!” They never heard me, of course, but there was considerable satisfaction in having access to some biblically sanctioned invective. I grew up in a family and church in which there were strong taboos against using cuss words, but now I had a suitable vocabulary for venting my anger.
Of the three names, Edomite, with support from Psalm 137 and the obscure prophet Obadiah, eventually rose to the top as my invective of choice. If someone crossed me, irritated me, made life difficult for me, I had a word for him: “Edomite.” I would mutter under my breath, “Damn Edomite!…good-for-nothing Edomite!…Edomite scum!”
When I left home for college after that summer’s work, I left a holy land. The streets and trails, the hills and mountains, the rivers and lakes—all were holy ground, the valley that I had grown up in was sacred space. It still is. But it wasn’t until years later that Edomite got rescued from the waste can of cuss words and got rehabilitated as prayer. I had been a pastor for fourteen or fifteen years and quite fluent in my use of biblical cuss words before I noticed how Psalm 108 used Edomite not as profanity but as prayer. I had been so delighted that I had a word I could use to curse people I didn’t like or who didn’t like me that I had completely missed the way the psalmist used the word.
By then, as a pastor, I had extensive experience with Edomites. Edomites, with their noisy agendas for running the kingdom of God on their own terms, continued to take me by surprise, much as those truckers did, invading my practice of the presence of God, disrupting my work to the glory of God in my congregation. It is not just pastors who get surprised, but it is easy for pastors to harbor the presumption that when we are wronged or ignored or dismissed, God himself is being blasphemed. Biblically sanctioned cussing—damned Edomites!—seems quite in order.
The noticing took place gradually, but eventually it forced me to remove Edom from my vocabulary of invective and install it in my vocabulary of petition.
Here is how Edom ends up in the prayer:
Who will bring me to the fortified city?
Who will lead me to Edom?
Hast thou not rejected us, O God?
Thou dost not go forth, O God, with our armies,
O grant us help against the foe,
for vain is the help of man!
With God we shall do valiantly;
it is he who will tread down our foes.
I have a long way to go before I assimilate this final movement of the prayer and live it from the core of my being, especially my vocational being. But at least I now know the lay of the land: Edom is not the enemy that I curse or shake my fist at or avoid or dismiss. Edom is the enemy whom I, with God’s grace and help, am led to visit and embrace.
Edom starts out as a negative. For years now I have been living in a place and doing work where I am learning to pray for instead of against Edom. Not very well much of the time—the sense of outrage and invective continues to linger, and all I can come up with many times is a prayer that God will tread down my foes. But I keep at it, praying to the God who in Jesus is teaching me to love my enemies, my dear Edomites, praying that God will lead me to Edom. When I started praying this prayer fifty-eight years ago, I didn’t know this is where I would end up. Prayer often involves us in what the sociologists call “unintended consequences.”
So what do I do with Edom? I ask God to bring me to Edom. And God does. Over and over and over again. The person, the task, the threat, the frustration, the circumstance to which my first impulse is to curse—“damn Edomite!”—becomes, through the patient praying of Psalm 108, an occasion for recycling my swords into plowshares.