Deborah Larsen Cowan

Psalm 40, Verse 1, Line 1
I waited patiently upon the Lord; he stooped to me and heard my cry. 
--NRSV
 
Dear Friends,
 
The Trinity and I were sitting on a sun-struck, windswept patio.
I thought they might enjoy some questions, so I had one at the ready:
Do you all like the way I love to think of you? That is, as constant “Presences.”
 
They nodded in assent, the eyes above their masks unspeakably kind.
Encouraged, I continued: could I at some point give each of you a common name?
(So as to think of you concretely.) And surely, one might be “Sophia.”
 
Literally, they exchanged glances and then their eyes spoke mirth.
My work today, I went right on, is how to speak of our Psalm 40,
the different English phrasings in line 1, verse 1.
 
Will you—O Presences, O Words from the beginning—please assist me?
Consider with me, “qavah”: in the Hebrew lexicon, this word
can also sound a note of stirring hope or expectation.
 
And then I said flat out: I much prefer an eager hoping to the common “...waited patiently….”
A hope that urges us is what will get us off our wicker chairs,
while patient waiting may well leave us sitting there, as if we’d turned to stone.
 
We need to rise right up and figure countless ways to act, to comfort, and to cure
in all creation. And thus, I pray the Three-of-you will bend toward us again and help us sing
in this dark period, this wrinkled evolutionary time: this crepitus, these rales.
 
At that the Triune eyes turned sad because they deeply felt
the piercing woes of human crossings and understood those waning moons,
the phasings of our faith. Although we cannot now place hands on friends and strangers,
still can we shuffle with them through the desert sands or wade across a stream.
 
And then with hopeful urgency, with growing expectations, 
we’ll reach at last that glowing other side--where we can once again link arms.
 
Deborah Larsen (Cowan)
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