What might the ultimate sound of the sacred be for you?
For some, it’s the sound of the sea.
Psalm 93 is deeply personal to me. It includes the soundtrack of the sacred in both words and images, sounds and echoes that at one moment in my life touched me deeply and continue to have deep resonance for my life.
#93 is well known because it follows Psalm #92 as the opening Psalms of Shabbat, both included in the Friday evening liturgy, together. Along with a few other psalms (coming next) they form the Friday evening worship playbook, with the particular tune in which they were sung in my childhood synagogue, they are stored deep inside my jukebox.
At some moment in my young adult life, my early 20’s, I felt quite lost and didn’t have a sense of who I was, what I wanted to do, where to be, or how to get there. I was quite down.
One Friday afternoon I sat on a rock, on the edge of a lake, in a foreign city, and stared into the water.
From the depths of my memories, a song emerged, or rather the sing-song that I recognized from Friday evening prayers. The verse that rose from the deep is from today’s psalm:
מִקֹּל֨וֹת ׀ מַ֤יִם רַבִּ֗ים אַדִּירִ֣ים מִשְׁבְּרֵי־יָ֑ם אַדִּ֖יר בַּמָּר֣וֹם יְהֹוָֽה׃
“Above the roaring of the mighty waters,
more majestic than the breakers of the sea
is GOD, majestic on high.”
Ps. 93:4
What about these words most moved me? Why did these words emerge?
At the time, I think it was the mere murmur of memory - the soft sound of the familiar melody, sung by whoever led the prayers at our little synagogue as the sun was setting. I missed home, longer for the familiar even though I left it all behind on the journey to embrace my own truths.
Maybe it was my own way into meditation, and deeper into mystery.
As I looked into the waters of the lake, the ancient words echoed and clarified for me that there was purpose beyond the present moment, I got a glimpse of clarity that mostly eluded me but now felt just around the corner, ready for when I will be more present and positive to rise above and find my way.
Somehow, the prayer, rising from the recess of my memory, helped my mood and clarified a decision I had to make about my next steps.
I walked away from that lake as the sun was setting, humming the words of this Sabbath psalm, after several few years of not attending Friday night prayers - but instead of feeling guilty - I felt calmer and more excited than I had been for a while. The rush of the waters in my ears felt like waves of possibilities.
Only afterwards, reflecting on this experience, it occurred to me that the words I was singing alluded to a mythic reality much older than the Psalm and likely preceding the Hebraic narrative.
What Psalm 93 is about is the epic and eternal battle between Chaos and Cosmos, personified in the ancient Semitic mythologies as the battle between the Godhead - often Male - and the Sea, the maritime monsters and the waters of the world - often personified as female. Hints of this battle between deities can be still deciphered in Genesis, but it’s mostly in the Psalms, the Book of Job and some of the prophets that the Hebrew Bible exposes the original layers of the pagan belief in the battle between Nature and Culture that would become the Hebrew trope of God vs. the Sea. I’ve written about this several times, including in this post on Isaiah.
Theories aside, what helped me on that Friday evening were the words I knew by heart, the memory of sacred context, and the ability to silence my inner rumbling chaos and waves of doubt with a fleeting but substantial sense of clarity and center. In my own way I deciphered what the meaning of this potent poetry is all about and why every Friday eve we long for a bit of clarity and calm to help us silence the sea monsters within, and better deal with the nonstop overwhelming waves of life and its demands.
Perhaps that’s why I also love the sea so much, and why, like so many of us, I feel calm and joy spending time on the seashore, especially during this time of year. At least a night of sleeping near the sea and synching my breathing with the rhythmic lull of the waves lasts me a full year.. That is the sound of sacred.
Whatever is your soundtrack of the sacred - for our ancient poets the divine was sometimes heard like the crush of the waves and the breath of the ocean. The Psalm may be suggesting that YHWH is greater than the sea - culture over nature --and yet for the older layers of our literature and, I suspect, for many of us pseduo-pagan - it is one and the same.
Whatever we inherited through sacred words and hymns, melodies and memories - these treasures are ours to keep, reimagine and use to make meaning and create comfort, find order and even celebrate chaos.
And as I was writing these words another prayer rose from my memory, a hymn that as a teen I love so much I learned by heart, screamed and sang and found much comfort in.
I invite you for a few moments of visual and audio inspiration with this vid clip of The Waterboys’ This is the Sea.
Behold, the sea.
Image: Illustration by Wenceslas Hollar: the spirit of God (with Tetragrammaton) moves over the face of the deep.
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