As an epilogue to our Blessing of the Animals, I offered a reflection on Psalm 104 today. It is a psalm extolling God's wonderful creation, especially animal life. The reading was especially poignant today, hearing the psalmist stand amazed at the "deep wide sea, brimming with fish past counting" as we all with heavy hearts consider the damage to marine life occuring now in the Gulf of Mexico. Humans continue to use and destroy rather than bless and nurture the creation.
This psalm is powerfully beautiful yet very odd. Consider the mention of Leviathan in verse 26. In other Old Testament books, Leviathan is the monster that inhabits the chaotic, unordered watery depths. In Job, it represents the power and mystery of God's creation, unconquered and uncontrolled by human beings. In Isaiah, it is the enemy of God that God had to conquer to bring order to the earth and overcome chaos. Yet in this psalm, Leviathan is God's pet dragon who romps in the waters (The Message). It is not scary at all. It is playful. It is God's playmate.
In verse 31, the psalmist calls God to rejoice in or enjoy God's creation. This is very strange language. No where else in the Psalms is God encouraged or called upon to rejoice or enjoy creation, God's own work. Humans are usually called upon to rejoice in God or enjoy God. The implication is that all of creation is upheld by God's joy. God delights in what God has made, and that delight is the very energy and vibrancy of the universe. This is very different than God as understood in the Noah story, for instance, where God regrets creation because of human wickedness and vows, after the flood, to restrain God's self from ever destroying the world again. It seems to be a commitment made with a sigh of resignation. Whereas Genesis paints a picture of God who sustains creation through an act of self-constraint, this psalm says that creation is sustained by divine revelry.
I like this playful, joyful God proclaimed by the psalmist. What about you?
The Leviathan in this psalm reminds me of the story of the poison tree that the traveller encounters in the forest. At first he warns people to pull it out by the roots. Then, after learning more about the possibility of the tree's role in the ecosystem, he urges people to put a fence around it so no one will be poisoned. The traveller eventually learns that little bits of the tree mixed by skilled healers allowed seriously ill people to recover.
ReplyDeleteThe Leviathan could be the warnings we hear of the excesses of youth. Some people see their lived experiences as being instructive that they seek to help others with those lessons learned.
The leviathan may represent the evil and darkness in the world. Whether we admit it or not, this is also God's creation. It is the part of life that causes suffering. This darkness is a part of the human condition, the darkness that can never go away. According to Cynthia Bourgeault, she says that by judging the darkness and trying to do away with it and trying to make everything light, we are just making it worse. It just deepens the darkness. We only know the light in the midst of suffering. If there were no darkness, we wouldn't know light. So we need both light and dark in our lives, And with God's love we can hold them both.
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