“Your Love Is Better than Life”
Embedded in Psalm 63:1-8, the prayer with which I begin and conclude each day, is this: “Your love is better than life” (3). The Hebrew term translated as “love” is hésed (khéh-sed), a lush word for which there is no simple English equivalent. Additional elements in a translation would include unwavering faithfulness, lovingkindness, and compassion. The term is further expanded and deepened in the Christian scriptures in the Greek term agápe.
Although I have used this prayer for years, I have recently experienced it in a more poignant way which I here seek to explore via the Psalter. First, in an era of galloping resource-disparity, meritolatry, and immigrant-cleansing the notion of love which is non-contractual, unconditional, and unexceptionable nothing less than boggles the mind. Whether at the individual or societal level, we mostly adhere to the dictum that our worth derives from our performance, however uneven the playing field may be. In contrast to the current religiosity/nationalism amalgam, Your hésed is a ”sign of contradictionion” (a la Lk 2:34), one cutting across the grain of virtually all sectors of our culture. Absent serious qualification and mitigation, this word, strewn across the Hebrew Bible, is widely dismissed as archaic and irrelevant, even seditious. The notion that the word hésed trustworthily characterizes the Heart and Depth of who You are, O Lover, is often dismissed as a nonstarter.
Second, as the fabric of our society unravels and we witness the unfolding betrayal of much of our collective vision, as the dire prognosis for our planet’s climate and our grandchildren’s future is tossed aside by plutocracy and privilege, as the technological tail is increasingly wagging the dog, my principal shield from despair is Your irrepressible embrace within which all of the brokenness and darkness is being held in a way vastly beyond my understanding. This Love, its scale cosmic, its duration timeless, its presence ubiquitous, is “my rock and my stronghold and my deliverer” (18:2). It is the one remaining place to stand in the face of contingency, dehumanization, unsustainability, and, ultimately, the threat of entropy.
Third, the psalter’s phrase addresses most immediately for me the matter of personal survival, a dynamic I share with the other animals. Even that issue, about which I am agnostic in nearly all respects, has a larger picture toward which hésed points. Two weeks ago I was “walk[ing] in the valley of the shadow of death” (23:4) as never before. In those hours and days I found myself stripped of all handholds save for Your hésed, O Lover. Intimations of Your spacious and encompassing embrace, outstripping even remnants of the angst regarding my own personal survival, held and holds me, later if not sooner, amid the thicket of unknowing and uncertainty obscuring all else.
A life-long explorer of the Horizon of You, I have fewer certitudes now than ever before. This and that sureties continue to fall away. But I have glimpsed, tasted, indeed experienced, Your hésed, and that has been sufficient again and again. In the words repeatedly intoned to me by Murray Rogers, my spiritual guide an even fifty years ago, “God [You, O Lover] is enough.” This day I once again acknowledge You as the infusing Sun in whose light and warmth I long to bask “all the days of my life” (23:6).
