A Wineskin in the Smoke

I’ve changed the name of my blog. (Cue Hobson from the movie “Arthur”: “I’ll alert the media.”) I chose the original title, “The Old Man From Scene 24,” almost at random from a jumbled mental attic where faded stacks of Spurgeon and shelves of Shakespeare jostle for space alongside trash bags stuffed with lines from sit-coms. A name for a blog seemed like a name for a dog - doesn’t matter much as long as he comes when you call him. Or a name for a cat - doesn’t matter because it won’t come no matter what you call it.

But my Bible reading the other day included a chunk of Psalm 119, the Obsessive Compulsive Doxology. This hymnopotamus, as Bible students know, contains a walloping 176 verses but the real kicker is in the structure: twenty-two blocks of eight verses each and each line of each block begins, in the correct order, with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Thus in Hebrew, verses 1-8 each begin with aleph, verses 9-16 with beth, 17-24 with gimel and so on clean to tav, the Hebrew z. This mania outstrips the alliterative outlines of a Baptist preacher in delirium. Mr. Monk the detective would love the 119th.

But far from being repetitive, strained, or mechanical, this poem contains some of the most memorable lines in all of Scripture. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” - v.105. “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word” - v.9. And the life verse of seminary students: “I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation” v.99.

But this particular morning my assigned portion, like an episode of Sesame Street, was brought to me by the letter Kaph, v.81-88. At this point, one could almost imagine that the psalmist himself has become a little weary of the whole project. His “soul languishes,” his “eyes fail,” and he seeks “comfort.” I figure he wrote this section somewhere around mid-term. And in the midst of his malaise, I found the following line:

“Though I have become like a wineskin in the smoke, I do not forget Your statutes.”

That one got my attention, so I did a little checking. Turns out in that culture they slung their empties from the rafters and pretty much forgot about them. These “bottles” (King James Version), basically gutted goatskins with the legs and necks knotted shut, soaked up the smoke and soot that drifted toward the vent in the middle of the ceiling. They desiccated like a fielder’s mitt abandoned in right field through the off-season. They cracked and blackened and lost their elasticity. They hung unnoticed there in the dark while life went on below.

Despite feeling like an empty pop bottle buried in the landfill the psalmist asserts that “I do not forget Your statutes.” God has hung him out to dry, but he intends to hang in there.

This describes eloquently that time of spiritual aridity that St. John of the Cross labeled the Dark Night of the Soul. In these times, God sets us aside from sensible blessings or spiritual progress in order to do an inner work. We sprawl inert, “like a patient etherized upon a table,” and often fail to understand that the operation can succeed only if we remain motionless and trust the hand of the surgeon. We feel abandoned: tossed out, cast off, hung up, put down. Like the psalmist, we feel the energy that drove our original project of praise, our well-ordered architecture of worship, suddenly grow wearisome. Like the chariots of Egypt in the muck of the Red Sea, our chariot wheels drive heavily and our spiritual progress silts up in the muck of our own rutted routines.

What to do in the Dark Night, when our solitary souls grow as dingy as yesterday’s wineskins? The psalmist himself gives the answer: hang in there. Do not forget God’s Word even when it seems God has forgotten you. Don’t wriggle and writhe and try to get yourself off the hook. Don’t weep for the loss of your pristine patent-leather brightness. Let the shiny exterior of a fashion-conscious Christianity grow brittle and broken. And wait for the Lord to work.

Around the same morning that I read this verse, another image from the Psalms struck me. Psalm 78.65 contains a bizarre, almost blasphemous depiction of God. This verse shows the Almighty rising like a hung over Marine, finally angered to action after repeatedly hitting the snooze alarm. “The Lord awoke as if from sleep, like a warrior overcome by wine.” He stumbles from his sandbagged bunker, BDU’s rumpled, Kevlar askew, lobbing grenades and laying down a line of suppressive fire. Like the sleepy neighbor and unrighteous judge in Jesus’ parables, this God seems to answer his peoples’ prayers not so much out of love as an irritated desire to shut them up.

The picture is theologically problematic. The point, however, is that he does answer. Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal that their god was taking either a nap or a crap (1 Kings 18.27). Sometimes we fear our faith leaves us open to the same charge, but the only answer we know is to keep on calling.

I admit there was a time when I felt certain I would be one of the bloated bags of Christ’s new wine. People would come from all around, belly up to the bar, drink deep and sigh that 1960 was a good year. More often these days I find myself roasting up in the rafters, set aside amidst the smoke and smother of those who seem more useful. I’ve hollered from up here in the obscurity that someone made a mistake, told the Lord that if he doesn’t do something soon the skin of my soul will be so cracked and crazed that I won’t hold the new wine anymore. So far, he’s just kept me here, curing. So it seems my job is just to remember until apocalypse or irritation, salvation or sobriety, moves him to act.

And if that’s where you find yourself from time to time, well, welcome, fellow-wineskin, to the smoke.

This entry was posted on June 17, 2009 at 11:20 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.