Lent 3, 5.3.21 – Psalm 139, 13-15

 

For it was you who created my being,

knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I thank you for the wonder of my being,

for the wonders of all your creation.

Already you knew my soul,

my body held no secret from you

when I was being fashioned in secret

and moulded in the depths of the earth.

As we know… as we generally insist… we are social beings.  Except for some eccentrics, we assume life is in community, giving and taking, loving, enjoying, squabbling, competing…  But this ancient poet is saying, before all that, I am a unique work of God, made and known and unrepeatable.  Even my identical twin, if I have one, is not me and is not the same as me.   No one is.  The Psalmist is amazed at having been made by God as a one-off.

This passage however is difficult.  The Hebrew is unclear, even muddled.  So I turn to a 21^st century Jewish scholar in Hebrew, Robert Alter, and this is how he renders it:

For you created my innermost parts,

wove me in my mother’s womb.

I acclaim you, for awesomely I am set apart,

wondrous are your acts, and my being deeply knows it.

My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was made in a secret place,

knitted in the utmost depths.[1]

The recurring theme in what the Psalmist is celebrating here is the secret place, his mother’s womb – which is not only the place of this unique creation, but the place also where love is born, continuing to this day.  …already you knew my soul…  God already, from eternity, knew and loved the person.  Now God wondrously clothes the loved person with a body:  You… knit me together in my mother’s womb… already you knew my soul… my body held no secret from you when I was being fashioned in secret… moulded in the depths of the earth.  In the miracle of creation, I not only have individuality – I have dignity and status as one God knew before ever I was knit together, as the Psalmist puts it. 

Maybe you think God shouldn’t love you all that much because you’re not up to it.  Perhaps it is easier generally to hide, safer anyway, to be inconspicuous, sit at the back, merge with the group, do what my peers do, think what they think.  (Last week we saw what this Psalmist thinks about trying to hide from God.)  But in Christian Meditation we are up-front, steady and still and silent before God, and in the love that formed us in the womb, humble but losing our embarrassment and hesitation.  Our presence there is our Yes to God.  In contemplative life and prayer we are learning, subtly, day by day, what Brother Lawrence called the practice of the presence of God.  It is a different, deeper, pervasive relationship with God.  Jesus could even think of it[2] as returning to the womb to be born anew, a new life in freedom and love.

Miles Coverdale (1535):

For my reynes[3] are thyne, thou hast couered me in my mothers wombe.

I wil geue thakes vnto the, for I am woderously made: maruelous are thy workes, and that my soule knoweth right well.

My bones are not hyd from the, though I be made secretly, and fashioned beneth in the earth.

 

 

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[1] Robert Alter: The Book of Psalms, A Translation With Commentary (Norton paperback 2007)

[2] John 3:4ff…

[3] Middle English reines, reenes…Old French reins… Old English rēnys…  Latin rēnēs kidneys, loins; hence renal.  In ancient Hebrew anatomy the kidneys (kilyah – כִּלְיָה)  were the seat of conscience and of just about everything basic to life.  It means the deepest aspects of the whole person.