{"id":893,"date":"2011-10-10T16:44:23","date_gmt":"2011-10-10T21:44:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/?p=893"},"modified":"2011-10-10T16:44:23","modified_gmt":"2011-10-10T21:44:23","slug":"back-to-beauty-the-psalms-in-our-worship-39","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/back-to-beauty-the-psalms-in-our-worship-39\/","title":{"rendered":"Back to Beauty: The Psalms in our Worship 39"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christians and Jews have acquired unusual views of what constitutes beauty.\u00a0 We tend to start with the idea that God is, by definition, beautiful.\u00a0 I’m sure that’s true, as far as it goes.\u00a0 But even that’s a difficult concept, since the God of the Bible seems at times difficult to call attractive (mysterium tremendum et fascinans<\/em>: the mystery both attracts and repels, remember).\u00a0 Perhaps we could argue that our language about God is beautiful, and it certainly can be, though even there the beauty can be a painful one.\u00a0 So it would be an interesting challenge to work out an entire Christian aesthetic.\u00a0 And some have done so in various ways: maybe I’d point you to the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar as a fine recent example.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes, however, things are more straightforward, and religious sensibilities do lead one to beauty.\u00a0 Think of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or da Vinci’s “Last Supper” or, in literature, Dante’s Inferno\/Purgatorio\/Paradiso<\/em> or Milton’s Paradise Lost<\/em>, just to name the most obvious examples.\u00a0 Or in more recent times, Bernstein’s painfully powerful Kaddish<\/em> or the hymns of Ralph Vaughn Williams.\u00a0 The quest for God, and thus for a true appreciation of ourselves, produces a desire for beauty.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The author of Psalm 48 certainly shared such a quest.\u00a0 The elegant little celebration of the beauties of Jerusalem opens and closes with praises of the incomparable God who is known through the blessings falling to Israel.\u00a0 In the middle come a complex description of what sounds like an imagined appearance of foreign tributaries in Jerusalem.\u00a0 (I say imagined, because such kings, as far as we know, never did this in real life.)\u00a0 Instead of being a place under threat, Jerusalem is a place of security, justice, hopefulness, and joy.<\/p>\n

Note the various ways in which the psalm refers to Jerusalem:<\/p>\n