For his name's sake

I really love my biblical namesake David. His name and mine means "beloved of God," and David's peculiar gift was to have been loved by God without ever being spared the troubles of earthly life.

He was a bold and sensitive boy, a giant-slayer by reputation, but a harp-player and a poet by avocation. From the rough foundations of his fate, he fashioned for himself a destiny. His innocent boyhood days as a shepherd long gone, he grew in power and renown to become a deep and difficult man: a plotter, a philanderer, a slaughterer and a king. Beloved, but often not lovable, his constant redemption was in the earnest endeavour of the psalmist's art.

In David's day "greatness" and "goodness" were seldom confused. In David's day a hero was not the opposite of a villain; a hero ceased to be a villain by dint of victory. Yet with greatness came the awareness of glory; that real glory could not be merely the possession of riches. Broody, sulking paranoid old King David, barely recognizable as the tender boy who'd brought down Goliath, was a living testament to that fact.

I brought down a giant once, in a pitched battle in a rural schoolyard a long time ago. He rose again and a boyhood revolution died. Now I find no glory in battle, but I still pluck the strings in search of sweetness, and fit my words together in a half-blind search for grace. Leonard Cohen referred to David's psalmistry beautifully as "the baffled king composing Halleliuah." I'm about the farthest thing from a king, but I think I know what he meant.

I found a psalm of my own this morning, a verse from a song I barely remember writing more than ten years ago. Back then, my words were stronger than I was, and these ones lasted a lot longer than the many shells of selves I've shed since then. I may have meant them then, I must have... but the valley of the shadow of death is between me and my past.

Like David with his leather sling
I seek the smoothest stones to fling
My voice, the purest tones to sing
A simple song of glory
A single strand of golden thread
A word for all that's left unsaid
A taste of wine, a crust of bread
A long unbroken story...

All I know is that these words survived the journey from there to here, and that somehow, I took a portrait of myself as I would be, back when I was only what I was. For my namesake, and for his name's sake...

Amen.