By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The Bible is not just a font of spiritual edification. During a lifetime spent trying to appreciate excellent writing, I have come to love the good book for its fine lyrical qualities too.
I probably first saw the Bible as poetry, not just some rote religious textbook, while serving as an altar boy during funerals at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Ogden, Utah. At one funeral, the choir sang Psalm 23, and suddenly, I was conscious of the remarkable beauty in words I had heard so many times before.
The psalm charmed me not just with its obvious succor, but also with its subtle invitations to fulsome companionship among “green pastures” and beside “restful waters.” I was intrigued by the possibility of a table, spread “before me in the presence of my enemies,” where my head is “anointed with oil” and “my cup overflows.”
With my boyhood mind opened to the lyricism of the Bible, I watched eagerly for other examples of fine word-crafting. I saw and admired the inspiring words inscribed on the rafters of another church where I also was an altar boy: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:7) My ears perked up when a school teacher pointed out this wonderful sentence: “A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter: he that has found one has found a treasure.” (Sirach 6:14-16)
Mine was an unusual boyhood. I spent many happy hours at the now-closed Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah. I loved the monks’ evening chant, just before going to bed, when they confessed their utter confidence in the watchful eye of God: “I will lie down in peace and sleep comes at once, for you alone Lord make me dwell in safety.” (Psalm 4:8) In Huntsville, at a 1970s folk mass, I first heard a song (by the Benedictine monks of Weston Priory, Vermont) about unconditional forgiveness in the face of bitter betrayal. It was based on this Bible verse from Hosea about his unfaithful wife: “Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.” (Hosea 2:14)
One day, as the monks read from Chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation, my young mind wandered and I visualized their words as pictures forming in the monastery’s 20-foot tall stained glass window. It was a thrilling sight, for the reading was about a woman giving birth while “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” Soon there appeared to the woman “a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads.” His tail “swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth.” The beast threatened to devour mother and child, until defeated in battle by “Michael and his angels.”
Later in college, while browsing at a decorate-your-dorm-room-with-art sale, I bought a cheap reproduction of Edward Hicks’ 1834 painting called The Peaceable Kingdom. It is based on one of my favorite passages in the Book of Isaiah: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them…They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.” (Isaiah 11:6-9) I have owned that piece of art for over three decades!
Another happy memory from the University of Notre Dame involves Sunday masses in our dormitory chapel. There, some 100 tenor and baritone male voices sang songs of praise and gratitude based on Psalm 91: “You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand; but it will not come near you. For he will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.” (Psalm 91: 3-5, 7, 11-12)
After college, when I fell in love and got married, I knew that for centuries, poets, playwrights, and songwriters all had tried to describe the essence of love. Yet, the man who wrote the words we read at our wedding—St. Paul, in his first epistle to the Corinthians—has described it far better than anyone else.
Paul ’s letter initially defined what love is not—i.e. it’s not powerful things alone like tongues of angels, the gift of prophecy, great knowledge, faith to remove mountains, or great sacrifices. This clever introduction draws us into the beautiful description that follows: “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things…So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 1-13).
Three children arrived after our marriage. Paul’s definition of love was essential to the important life lesson we tried to teach them—another bit of New Testament poetry also known as the Golden Rule. The gospel writer Matthew outlined the essential elements of a good life: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind…You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22: 36-39) Thanks to Matthew, we knew the rule, but thanks to Paul, we could help our children understand what it means to love.
Matthew’s fellow gospel writer Luke also supplied wonderful words that we read to our children each Christmas—the classic description of the Nativity: “And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.” Luke placed a brilliant literary exclamation point on his story: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!’” (Luke 2:7-14)
Some 800 years before Luke, the prophet Isaiah, writing for “people who walked in darkness” and now had “seen a great light,” provided another magnificent exclamation point. Isaiah’s words, which also inspired Handel’s Messiah, have graced countless Christmas midnight masses I have attended: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given…and his name will be called ‘Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.’” (Isaiah 9:2, 6)
Although it is not such great material for reading to children, as my beard has grayed I also now better appreciate the somewhat inscrutable opening lines of John’s Gospel. John penned a very different but also lovely Nativity story: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” (John 1: 1, 14) What better poetry than that which calls us to see God in our fellow humans?
Today, after almost 60 years of appreciating good writing, more lifetime is behind me than in front, more poetry read than to be read. Ironically, as I approach life’s final phases, my mind has come full circle and returned to those altar boyhood moments when I first started to see the Bible as a lyrical work.
In these twilight days, however, I dwell on a different part of Psalm 23’s lyrics. I am startled and frightened at the dark prospects of walking though “the valley of the shadow of death.” Thankfully, the psalm’s other poetry assures me of a divine light—I need “fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.
