Psalm 65 is one of my favorite psalms.
Recurring each week during the ordinary course of Wednesday Lauds, it expresses a jubilant awe at all that God has done. One of the things I love most about this beautiful prayer, in fact, is the way its very act of praise blossoms from something we owe to God in justice to something we sing joyously in overflowing hope and gratitude.
In the Grail Translation, which the monks of Belmont Abbey adopt in their psalter, Psalm 65 begins, “Praise is due to you in Sion, O God. To you we pay our vows in Jerusalem, you who hear our prayer.” The language is calm and measured, acknowledging an exercise of duty, a debt we owe to our Creator. Moreover, the next verses emphasize this creaturely dependence by articulating both our mortality and our fallenness: “To you all flesh will come. Our evil deeds are too heavy for us, but our transgressions you wipe away.”
But by admitting our guilt and our inability to bear up under the self-incurred burden of sin, the psalm opens us to more profound gratitude. And in this recognition, God’s mercy changes even the metaphor at work. From a heavy load we try to lift – and which keeps us from standing upright – our sins become a mark that God simply wipes away.
The fact that God loves and delivers us – even though we can do nothing to deserve it – lies at the root of our gratitude, and it prompts the psalmist to marvel at the sheer blessing of God’s care. As the language warms, we arrive for the first time at hope: “You are the hope of all the earth, and of far distant isles,” and the psalmist’s praise shifts more and more deeply into awe. The omnipotent God not only forms the vast and terrible mountains but also quiets the storm, brings stillness to restlessness, and order to chaos. He fills the world with enduring joy.
And here the psalm seems to blossom out in its fullness:
“…God’s ever-flowing river brims over
to prepare the grain.
And thus you provide for the earth:
you drench its furrows;
you level it, soften it with showers;
you bless its growth.
You crown the year with your bounty.
Abundance flows in your pathways;
in pastures of the desert it flows.
The hills are girded with joy,
the meadows clothed with flocks.
The valleys are decked with wheat.
They shout for joy; yes, they sing!”
In these last verses we discover a river of grace and the promise and purpose in its brimming-over. We find a vision of care that embraces the good of a future harvest from the beginning, preparing the grain by readying the soil in which it will grow. We encounter the hope inherent even in the sometimes painful realities of flood and rain, which level and soften the earth: they, too, become means of readying the ground for a promised bounty. And the very pathway of our life in God transforms, by His mercy, into a river of joy, flowing undiminished through the desert places.
I love Psalm 65 for its beautiful act of faith in the will of God. With our limited, human vision, we only see a sliver of the journey at any given moment, and it can be difficult to appreciate or even guess, sometimes, how God will and does work even in periods of darkness or uncertainty. But Psalm 65 sees with the vision of praise. And it embraces the gratitude and hope that bring past and future together under God’s eternal mercy. The plowing and watering, growth and harvest, are equally present in His loving will. It is why we can “thank God ahead of time” without presumption, as Bl. Solanus Casey urges.
This weekend, All Saints Day calls us to praise God in blessed communion, and All Souls Day reminds us to pray in hope for our beloved dead. Let’s remember that this praise and this hope unite us in Christian joy because both have their source in the eternal love of God, brimming even in the desert.
