Singing these ancient hymns anew in chapel that day, I suppose I started to feel the Spirit, as those evangelists of my childhood would have put it. I noticed something happening in my mind and my body as I chanted, and also now as I reflect on it all. Lewis was an even more reserved white boy than I am, so that takes some doing. When Lewis paid attention to this musical delight, he found himself tempted to take up song and dance. The wonders of Torah fill the Psalmist with delight. “I find my delight in your commandments, because I love them” (119:47) “Your statues have been my song wherever I make my home” (119:54). Psalm 119 connects it directly to musical imagery. Delight is unchecked pleasure, and, like wonder, it’s often not a thing that comes through thought alone. Lewis once said that the greatest gift of the Psalter, for him, was the invitation to delight in God. And the source of the rhyme was song itself. My mom’s prayers, the Psalmist looking up toward hills, the opening of squinted eyelids: all that rhymed, you might say, within the poetry of the prayer. So as my chin and voice lifted, I also had a flashing vision of Mom, sitting with her Bible and a cup of morning coffee. My downcast eyes turned up to the hills my eyes too shut to see the wonders of Torah began to open.Īs it happened, that week my mom had sent me Psalm 121 in a text, which is likely why it was in my mind. “I lift up my eyes to the hills.” In lifting my voice, I’d actually lifted my chin and eyes, and so doubled the metaphor with the two Psalms. Psalm 121 also flashed into my memory, even as we worked on 119. When I noticed this, something odd happened. I actually felt my chin lifting as I walked up the notes. The tonal setting we put it to that day ascends up a small scale in the first syllables, so that by the time we got to “eyes,” we’d heard our voices rise a step and a half. That’s where the chanting does some work. I might pray “Open my eyes,” but do so without ever noticing what I’m saying, and so go on with eyes shut and miss the prayer and the wonder. So it’s a good surprise for me to read that there are wonders of Torah that are of an entirely different order than what I’m imagining when I hear the word “law.” But here’s the thing: I’m coming into chapel a little distracted, and it’s likely going to take more than a spoken phrase to catch my attention. And Leviticus seems not far behind, with its catalogue of commandment after commandment about diets and sex and farming. I live in Texas, where the legal codes have gone through more revision and include more riders than I think anyone knows, let alone can follow. I think of law as binding, restricting, and sometimes oppressing. It’s one that can undo a good bit of my own pre-judgments about what law, including Jewish Law, is.
“Open my eyes, that I may see the wonders of your law.” Verse 18 asks for the vision that will inspire such love and trust, suggesting helpfully that it doesn’t come naturally. Like the rest of 119, these verses address the deep trust and love that the singer has for Torah. (By the way, can you imagine 26 verses of “Just As I Am”?).
We recently chanted a portion of Psalm 119, the third or “Gimel” stanza, if you’re following the Hebrew alphabet through the acrostic of the long Psalm. They’ll likely show up in my memory later in the day. The words that I otherwise would just read or hear read are now in my body. It can focus the attention while it also aids the memory. Anglican chant is a simple way of putting text into a repeated tune. Fields’s pulpit, or from the song evangelists that would lead us through Bill Gaither’s hymns. When we chant the Psalms in my Episcopal seminary chapel, we’re a long way from Rev. You don’t necessarily want to be there when it happens. Music lives in the body in a special way, which is why even this reserved white boy from Indiana can sometimes feel an inexplicable need to dance. Fields of the Ravensbrook Widow Missionary Baptist Bible Church could turn from sermon to song within a single sentence. They found the place where thought turned to song. The Black preachers that I spent time around in my childhood had the ability to make music out of a sermon. It can invite us through a door that we don’t have access to cerebrally. At the same time, though, music can also elevate.