{"id":2964,"date":"2024-03-30T00:22:48","date_gmt":"2024-03-30T00:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/?p=2964"},"modified":"2024-03-30T00:22:58","modified_gmt":"2024-03-30T00:22:58","slug":"evensong-afterword","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/?p=2964","title":{"rendered":"EVENSONG AFTERWORD"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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So, why have I spent the past seven months of weekdays writing about the Book of Psalms and posting my own poems about them? I mean, I\u2019ve probably lost some of my 100 \u201cfriends\u201d over it. Nope, no one unfriended me, but I\u2019ll bet I\u2019ve been put to sleep \u2014 that is, \u201csnoozed\u201d \u2014 by a few.

I got the idea to study the Psalms last summer, really, after songwriter Paul Simon released his latest album, \u201cSeven Psalms.\u201d Though we\u2019d once shared an elevator ride with him in Manhattan, I knew him only for his big hits. But his new songs are special, a sort of sacred \u201celevator\u201d music.

Also, over the past few years, I\u2019ve been working on a novel all my own about two brothers who get along with each other like Cain and Abel, or like Jacob and Esau \u2014 you know, a pair of Old Testament sibs who love each other until it hurts. Part One is finished. Now I\u2019m writing Part Two.

Both of these brothers are ministers \u2014 men of the cloth \u2014 except one is wealthy and prefers to wear a fancy suit with his red baseball cap, while the other is as poor as Job\u2019s turkey and wears whatever he finds that fits. The poor fellow also focuses on praise rather than on condemnation.

That is where studying the Psalms came in \u2014 what I\u2019d always thought were songs of praise, not hate-filled paeans to paranoia and genocidal violence. While a select few of the psalms are true works of art, David \u2014 the acclaimed author, but a barenaked liar \u2014 could not have written them.

There was one last thing that I wanted to do \u2014 to work out my own thoughts and feelings about the God to Whom I\u2019ve always prayed, though I\u2019ve always felt like a red-headed stepchild of God. Not even the ancient Hebrews would utter His name. They turned YHWH into a four-letter word.

I have come to believe that Yeshua ben Yosef \u2014 or, rather, the lowly Jesus \u2014 was exactly right about God or Heaven. It \u2014 whatever It\u2019s called \u2014 is within every one of us, although It is buried so deeply that we have to dig through layers of lies, greed and pride to find our own good news.

Like the universe around us, our worlds of truth are evolving and will continue to do so \u2018til all the spinning stops. Within this spiral galaxy we call home, the views never change, even though the cosmos allows us to drift farther from its center until time or chance makes us stand our ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, why have I spent the past seven months of weekdays writing about the Book of Psalms and posting my own poems about them? I mean, I\u2019ve probably lost some of my 100 \u201cfriends\u201d over it. Nope, no one unfriended me, but I\u2019ll bet I\u2019ve been put to sleep \u2014 that is, \u201csnoozed\u201d \u2014 by … Continue reading EVENSONG AFTERWORD<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2964"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2965,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2964\/revisions\/2965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gaillardiapress.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}