Dance

AM Psalm 30, 32 • PM Psalm 42, 43
Joshua 6:1-14 • Rom. 13:1-7 • Matt. 26:26-35

The first of today’s Morning Psalms is headed in the New Revised Standard Version as “Thanksgiving for Recovery from Grave Illness.” It is further identified as “A Song at the dedication of the temple. Of David.” It begins:

I will extol you, O LORD, for you have drawn me up,
and did not let my foes rejoice over me.

O LORD, my God, I cried to you for help.
and you have healed me.

O LORD, you brought up my soul from Sheol,
restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.

I am reminded of a book titled, Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up to Me by Richard Farina. The title is taken from a blues song by one Furry Lewis, who laments that if he was in a river of whiskey, he’d dive to the bottom and never come back up, because the woman he’s loved has taken his money and “don’t pay no mind” to him. For this singer, it is a kind of illness. He is “lovesick.” And it’s serious.

Singing the blues is a way of crying for help, yet I don’t know of any blues songs in which things end up happily ever after for the singer, unless it is that the crying out somehow expiates the pain. Even then, the blues singer never thanks God. There may be such songs, but I haven’t heard them. In our psalm for today, however, the psalmist thanks the Lord, because the Lord has “brought up [his] soul from Sheol” and “restored [him] to life.”

What sort of life is it?

According to Wikipedia, “Sheol” appears in the Hebrew Testament 66 times, with meanings and interpretations sometimes contradictory. Here in Psalm 30, The Pit seems to be equated with Sheol, seen here, apparently, as the underworld where all souls go after the death of the body, whether they have been righteous or wicked.

A natural comparison would be the Land of the Dead in The Odyssey, where there is no punishment other than having to exist without one’s body. Which, for the ancient Greeks, is punishment indeed. When Odysseus travels to the Land of the Dead in Book 11, he encounters the shade of Achilles, and lauds him for ruling over dead men’s souls, thus avoiding the pain of death. But Achilles will have none of it:

… Let me hear no smooth talk
of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils.
Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
for some poor country man, on iron rations,
than lord it over all the exhausted dead. (lines 577-580)

For Achilles, literally “getting his hands dirty” would be better than the state in which he is trapped—a state without dirt, without rations, without anything. There is no hope for him to be brought up from where he is. There is nothing for which to thank a god. He is stuck for eternity.

By contrast, Homer might find it extraordinary in Psalm 30 that the Lord has “brought up” the psalmist’s soul (there is no indication that Achilles HAS a soul as we might know it), even as the psalmist may have been in Sheol metaphorically or spiritually. I am not the first one to suggest that being brought up out of Sheol prefigures resurrection. But we would not need to go that far to say that, unlike Achilles, the psalmist is able experience his body. Later, the psalmist says, “You have turned my mourning into dancing.” (30:11). Dancing, in turn, is part of giving thanks to God forever. My late teacher, John Robert Locke, used to say that people don’t dance enough. And he was himself, among other things, a dance instructor.

We know people who have recovered from grave illnesses such as cancer, say—or covid—who have expressed their Thanksgiving with all their mind and with all their heart and with all their soul. We also know that sometimes no matter how hard people pray, and no matter how hard others are praying for them, some people do not survive those and many other illnesses.

Such circumstances, as do so many other circumstances in Scriptures and in life, lead inevitably to the question of “What is God’s will?” It is a question I am not ready fully to take up here. It is worth mentioning, however, that what follows events in today’s reading from Joshua is that Joshua and his soldiers slaughter every man, woman, and child in Jericho, save for Rahab and a few others, once the walls come tumbling down. It’s the part they don’t teach us in Sunday School. This has led in no small part to discussion of (among other things) ethics. Of genocide. And trying to reconcile them with “God’s will.” Doubtless this topic comes up in our series in Adult Forum on how to read those parts of the Bible that we don’t particularly like.

When we have been rescued from Sheol—when we have been “brought up”—it is easy enough to say we will thank God forever. How many of us might have transgressed, and then prayed, “O Jesus, if you’ll save me this ONE time, I’ll NEVER DO THAT AGAIN!” But then how many of us forget to carry thanks on our lips and in our mind, heart, and soul, and go on to repeat that or other transgressions?

Maybe it would be beneficial not to wait until we have cast ourselves into Sheol, physically, psychologically, or spiritually, to get in the habit of dancing that dance of thankfulness to God every day.

It couldn’t hurt.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage (1990).

Written by James Gamble

...who hopes to one day travel again and make it back one more time to Atlantic Canada.