And we unhemmed all our jeans so they dragged on the floor

But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my Glory, and the Lifter of my head.

I cried aloud to the Lord, and He answered me from his holy hill. Selah Psalm 3:3

One example of the immeasurable and inexplicable good gifts from the hand of our Creator is that of music.  Really the joy and power of song make no scientific material sense and is one of those “outside the box” indicators.  The same pile outside of the humanist door with Shakespeare sonnets and sunsets.  Why should we marvel at sunsets and rainbows?

And on top of that toppling stack of gifts that are waiting to be named and inventoried on my little list of 1000 are the Psalms which have worked their way into the hearts and souls of humanity for eons and bound them together with truth and peace throughout the travails that are common to man. 

My first tiny glimpse of that was as a young girl ripping through Heidi.  What a novel thought that Heidi’s blind grandmother would find such comfort in the twenty-third Psalm.  Novel.  =) Novel in the sense that is what stories do, wrap words around life so that we slow down and notice and remember, forever.  That was forty-six years ago, and I still remember pausing for that moment, to consider.  

My old Bible that was left behind on a seventh-grade History trip many years ago had moments and dates and names all through the Psalms that I had claimed, that I was praying over someone, or that declared His answer to me, from His holy hill.  So many of these Psalms are tied to a moment or a person.  Or a summer.

I know where I was the summer of ’72: El Instituto Lingüístico de Verano en Tlalpan, México, D.F. My dad was doing an external audit of the books for them, and my mom, the ever good sport was in charge of entertaining twenty-some-odd teenagers.  So we painted some kind of hippie murals on the rec room wall... a big hand with a single finger pointing up One Way and an unrolling parchment with the words, “His banner over me is love,” above the ping pong table.  And my mom sewed big pillows in hippie colors and old blue jeans and lightly tossed them around so we could be cool while we worked out all the Fisher and Spasskey chess games and pretended to argue over and discuss the wisdom of their choices.  And we had to play Rook because it was unChristian to play with real cards because back then they were known to be the gateway drug to all sorts of trouble.  And I read the Agatha Christie books over and over again because that is all that was in the library besides Bible Commentaries.  I did that is, until I started having nightmares full of slashing knives and crashing flower pots mysteriously tossed off balconies. There was Edgar, a young man that I managed to give my address even though I didn’t speak Spanish and he didn’t speak English when we were at the 1968 Olympics swimming pool and he brought me four dozens roses every single afternoon for two weeks until I begged the staff cook to tell him to never come back.  And my mom who of course knew absolutely nothing about soccer started a soccer league and was the center ref and ran back and forth, back and forth on that field every afternoon blowing her whistle, until the afternoon monsoons rolled in, that is.  And then we would gather in the rec room, and a couple of kids would pluck away tunelessly on their guitars and toss their stringy hair back and we would sing those songs, those choruses that were very edgy in a world of hymnbooks.  His banner over me is Love.  With hand motions.  

These edgy new songs which have put the ache of the human heart into words backwards and forwards into time to the very fulcrum of history, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" that is, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"  

My Glory and the Lifter of my head.