The Tao of Torah - Psalm 19

Each morning, before the rose hue begins its glow in the East, I slip on my rubber boots and trudge across the backyard to our chicken coop. There I find our four hens snuggled in the hay of their laying box, its door latched shut to protect them from a wondering raccoon or prowling opossum. Now that day is near, those dangers have mostly passed, so I open the hatch, hang their feeder from a hook and let them loose to their run.

I have come to appreciate this walk, each morning, as short as it is. Even though I live near an interstate, and the sounds of the city seem to echo through our neighborhood, this time of early morning is quiet, like a pause in a conversation between two people.  Night has almost come to a close, it has said its word, and the day is near, ready to speak. I stand listening in this moment between what has been said and the answer to come.

An ancient poet, perhaps even King David himself, experienced a moment like this one. The blazing stars began to fade, and then, the sky grew radiant with red as the sun marched forth like an athlete, proud in victory. What this poet saw in this transition from night to day, this rising of the sun, wasn’t simply the working out of a mechanism, the spinning of a clock through the power of a God who long ago wound the knob. No, the poet saw a great conversation, a common chorus in which God was the very grammar that gave the jumbled wonders sense.

The poem this poet wrote we now know as Psalm 19, the verses we read/chanted just a moment ago. C.S. Lewis, wrote that this is “the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world.” Given such high praise, we would do well, not simply recite these verses, but to dwell with them.

The conversation the Psalm invites us into begins with creation. The day and the night talk with one another, the skies make a proclamation, the atmosphere gives witness. And what is the subject of this conversation? The glory of God. All creation, even those parts without “words or language,” speak of the wonders of God. Worship is the deepest word of all things; to give God glory is the most basic way of making sense.

Then, the Psalm takes a seemingly strange turn. From creation, we turn to Torah—the Law of the Lord. Law, here, is not quite the right term, at least as we hear it now. If we read those books that make up what the tradition has called the Torah we find stories more than sanctions, narratives more than rules. The statues, the commandments, the judgements that revive the soul, that are more precious than gold and sweeter than honey, are not simply codes to be followed. The law is an expression of the grammar at the heart of the world, the ordering of language that makes the conversation possible and draws it toward its ultimate meaning in praise.

Reflecting on this, I thought of another insight of C.S. Lewis, not from his work on the Psalms, but from his important and ever more relevant book The Abolition of Man. There he seeks to name the fundamental rhythm of human life, the flowing truth that people, throughout the world, have found as the source of goodness. Lewis borrows from the Chinese philosophical tradition and calls this reality the Tao. “It is the reality beyond all predicates…” writes Lewis, “It is Nature, its is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time.” Deep within all things, the Tao is the measure of human life and action. “It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of things we are.”

My sophomore philosophy major self would have scoffed at such an account of a deep universal Way. There is movement against thinking that there are any essentials to our nature, any basic truth to who we are. But as I have grown into middle age, I have come to see the reality of such a beating rhythm at the heart of all things, a givenness of truth and goodness which we do not make but in whose pace we are called to move our steps. Without this Way that leads toward worship, the world simply becomes a plastic landscape ready to bend to our whims. Absent the Way of God’s glory, the Tao of Torah, our wants become easily manipulated and we find ourselves their slaves, captive to those who can control them.

The world that we see unraveling in blazing fires and catastrophic floods, broken lives and relationships, communities absorbed in conflict—these are all signs that we have stepped out of the great conversation, the grammar rooted in God’s glory. And in the face of such chaos, lacking a Way in which to join the rhythm of our lives, we are tempted toward power and control in its most brazen forms as a desperate attempt toward an order we make ourselves.

In the quiet, there is another voice, one that is so fundamental that there would be no music without it, no life. The trees silhouetted against the growing dawn would not exist without this quietest of voices, this humble foundation of all things. And yet, for all its deep mystery, we are able to know it, to grasp it with our feeble minds:

“…the commandment of the Lord is clear

and gives light to the eyes.”

The Torah, the Way is not simply a cold, impersonal, feature of the world. It is the Law of the Lord, and that Lord is a humble and personal God who will come to instruct and guide, heal and save, God has come to give us life. In this way, the Psalm ends in praise of the God who is “my strength and my redeemer.” If we are to have the energy, the power to join in the pattern of life that the Law provides, we will do so not through our own efforts but by joining in the endless, dynamic energy of God. This is what eternal life is about, not so much an endless succession of days, but a grounding in the very reality that is Life itself.

It is in the context of that life, from its grounding and power, that all of our meditations and words should flow. That our language and thoughts should be acceptable to God is not simply a matter of moral judgement, but of sense itself. Like the language of the day and night, the communication at the heart of all creation, we are invited into the great conversation grounded in the grammar of worship. The question the Psalm asks of us is this, will we join the common song and let our lives move to the rhythm of the Way, or will we seek to make our own meanings, pushing the brute violence of our choices, the raving dance of our desires?

We will all have a chance, if we pay attention, to listen in on the language of the world. It is here now, in the very existence of each person around you, the stone and wood of this building, the vast sky above. Each element, at its very heart, is filled with a yearning toward praise, a longing for the Life in which all things find their meaning. Our work, our challenge, is to learn to move ourselves into this Way, to let go of our petty, garbled talk, so that we can join in the great conversation of God’s Word, a Word whose constant subject is God’s eternal, everlasting, glory. Amen.