Truth be told I was waiting for you to get to this psalm, because Sunday morning I woke to images of fire and charred bodies and the deepest despair yet (which is always amazingly deeper than the last despair), and Psalm 37 has been on repeat in my head ever since. As a Black "Hebrew" girl who grew up following The Way but also being deeply entrenched in Black culture, I started singing in gospel chorus in junior high school and continued through my high school years at Music and Art here in NYC. There are at least two gospel songs that have verse 25 of this psalm either as the verse or the chorus, and so whenever I sang it it meant something to me. But not because of bread...
Psalm 37 was one of my father's favorite psalms (the other being psalm 90 because it was the only one attributed to his hero, Moses) and I can still hear my dad's voice, full of emotion reading:
"Fret not thyself because of evildoers,
Neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity.
For they shall soon be cut down like the grass,
And wither as the green herb."
The psalm was a favorite amongst the Rastafarians in Jamaica, with whom my dad spent an awful lot of time "likken' chalice." I suspect that they loved it partially because of the mention of "green herb" but also because of the overall theme of holding on to hope when it seems like evil and terror will win. The words in verse 35 and 36 that read (and as much as I hate the King James Version of the Bible for political reasons, it's still one of my favorite interpretations)
"I have seen the wicked in great power,
And spreading himself like a green bay tree.
Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not:
Yea, I sought him, but he could not be found."
... have long been solace to me, as they were to my dad, when I look around and wonder why the corrupt leaders of the world do what they do, and why the people who suffer the most have zero power to stop them. It gives the hope that one day, if you hold out long enough, if you keep trying, if you keep walking in the light as dark as it all feels, when literal people are burning and dying and starving, and there is no mercy, God's got it. Because I was young once, and now I'm old, and I've never seen God entirely forsake the righteous.
And I'm going to hold on to that, because it's all I got....
Truth be told I was waiting for you to get to this psalm, because Sunday morning I woke to images of fire and charred bodies and the deepest despair yet (which is always amazingly deeper than the last despair), and Psalm 37 has been on repeat in my head ever since. As a Black "Hebrew" girl who grew up following The Way but also being deeply entrenched in Black culture, I started singing in gospel chorus in junior high school and continued through my high school years at Music and Art here in NYC. There are at least two gospel songs that have verse 25 of this psalm either as the verse or the chorus, and so whenever I sang it it meant something to me. But not because of bread...
Psalm 37 was one of my father's favorite psalms (the other being psalm 90 because it was the only one attributed to his hero, Moses) and I can still hear my dad's voice, full of emotion reading:
"Fret not thyself because of evildoers,
Neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity.
For they shall soon be cut down like the grass,
And wither as the green herb."
The psalm was a favorite amongst the Rastafarians in Jamaica, with whom my dad spent an awful lot of time "likken' chalice." I suspect that they loved it partially because of the mention of "green herb" but also because of the overall theme of holding on to hope when it seems like evil and terror will win. The words in verse 35 and 36 that read (and as much as I hate the King James Version of the Bible for political reasons, it's still one of my favorite interpretations)
"I have seen the wicked in great power,
And spreading himself like a green bay tree.
Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not:
Yea, I sought him, but he could not be found."
... have long been solace to me, as they were to my dad, when I look around and wonder why the corrupt leaders of the world do what they do, and why the people who suffer the most have zero power to stop them. It gives the hope that one day, if you hold out long enough, if you keep trying, if you keep walking in the light as dark as it all feels, when literal people are burning and dying and starving, and there is no mercy, God's got it. Because I was young once, and now I'm old, and I've never seen God entirely forsake the righteous.
And I'm going to hold on to that, because it's all I got....
https://youtu.be/hhXHlfs0Cbw?si=rgQuFWtOlMiDyqQQ