Many hikers have a need always to be conquering new
territory, just as many readers need new things to read. But there’s as much
value in returning again and again to the same trail you’ve walked many times
before as there is in returning to a favorite well-thumbed book.
My current walk of choice
is a loop of just more than two miles in a state park about a fifteen-minute
drive from my parish. It starts fairly easily, builds up to a bit of a
challenge in the middle, and cools off again at the end. For nine-tenths of a
mile on the return half of the loop, one covers a small piece of the
Appalachian Trail. I can leave home for the hike and be back in well under
ninety minutes.
An old hat sort of trail
like this one might seem boring, always the same route, more a trial than a
trail after repeated visits. Yet in a certain sense it’s never quite the same
trail, as Heraclitus tried to say about the river. To return to it is to
encounter both sameness and difference, familiarity and strangeness.
We’re blessed with four
distinct seasons where I live in the Hudson Valley. Often enough there even
seem to be innumerable micro-seasons within the four. The beginning of winter
is indistinguishable from the end of fall. It gets to be pleasantly cold with
occasional flurries of snow in mid-December. Then comes the season of bitter
cold in January, followed by the season of far more snow than anyone but skiers
ever want to see before finally we make it to the nasty melted-snow and mud
season which leads into spring. Even here I’m summarizing. The seasonal
differences alone make for a diversity of hiking experience.
The climatic changes bring
with them a great number of other changes along the trail. Most obviously you
see differences in the quality of light and of course in warmth and humidity.
Varying amounts of water in the streams and runlets you cross, which sometimes
are bone dry and at others become little torrents. Then there is flora and
fauna. A tree has sometimes fallen near the path or even across it. A new path
veers around it if it can, or else you need to climb over it until those who
take care of this sort of thing cut through it. There are also the huge
differences which stem from the amount and color of foliage, which varies from
none to budding to verdant to the full fall spectrum to none again. By
themselves the differences in the trees can make the trail unrecognizable from
one visit to another. Early in the year, forsythia provides the only color
aside from the green of the invasive barberry. Then different waves of plants
blossom and flourish. The trail is edged with the blue of violets and
bugleweed, the white of anemones, aster, and Canada mayflower, the pink of wild
geraniums.
The difference made by the
sound of birds is striking. In colder times, you get used to the still lack of
birdsong, but as it warms up and the music returns, it reminds you that there
exists this world of beauty you had forgotten all about, perhaps out of an
unconscious sense of self-preservation in the face of seasonal affective disorder.
There is a period of time at the end of winter where the total lack of fauna is
rather off-putting. Especially when you come across evidence which shows that
there are animals lurking somewhere out of sight, when you see a sizeable and
relatively fresh footprint in the snow at your feet which makes you wonder
exactly how hungry a black bear is when he wakes up from hibernation.
There are variations in the
number of bugs which, true to their name, buzz around your head annoyingly.
Differences in the number of chipmunks you startle squeaking into the
underbrush and the number of garter snakes sunning themselves which you nearly
step on if you’re walking fast enough. Differences in the number of people (if
any) you come across as you hike. Sometimes you can tell you’re the first
person to tread the path that day, the number of spider webs you walk through
being a dead giveaway. Sometimes the trail is packed. People sometimes don
masks and give you a wide berth as you approach.
And you’re different too. You
come to the trail with different levels of hay fever, more or less easily out
of breath on a given day, with different preoccupations.
The mingled familiarity and
strangeness that come with returning to a well-known trail often call to my
mind the cyclical and seemingly monotonous prayer of the psalms in the Divine
Office. Week after week the same psalms are prayed at the same hours of the
day—matins and lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline—barring the
intrusion of a major feast to break the cycle with Sunday psalms. The complete
psalter of one-hundred fifty psalms is repeated every week for those who pray
the more traditional form of the Office. And this rotation of psalms is just
one sphere in a liturgical cosmos alive with various cycles and epicycles.
Despite the fact that you’re
confined to the same psalms, you find as you return to them both sameness and
difference, especially when you pray them in Latin and grow in your
understanding of the words. Praying the Office in a language other than your
own becomes a kind of sacramental of this mingled sameness and difference. It
goes without saying that Sacred Scripture in any language provides
inexhaustibly fruitful meditation.
The different antiphons of
the Office comment upon and tease out different shades of meaning in the sacred
text. The mode of the antiphon determines which of the eight psalm tones is
used to chant a psalm, which itself creates variations in mood and sheds light
on different aspects of the psalm’s meaning. The same familiarity and newness
as your favorite walk in the woods.
Psalm CXVIII (CXIX
according to the Hebrew numbering) is the longest and one of the most
repetitive of the psalms. It’s an acrostic in Hebrew and is the single longest
chapter of any book in the Bible with its one-hundred seventy-six verses. The
whole psalm speaks of the blessedness of those who love and follow the Law of
the Lord. For those whose breviary uses the psalter as it was reorganized by
Saint Pius X, Psalm CXVIII is prayed throughout the daytime hours on Sunday,
broken up into eleven pieces and distributed from prime through none. The
recitation of this psalm is itself a repetitive meditation on the divine Law
which is a microcosm and distillation of the monotony of the psalter as a
whole.
The Sunday psalms,
including Psalm CXVIII, are also used during the week whenever there is a
solemnity. During an octave these psalms are used all week long, repeating
every day the same texts, giving truth to the lines “I will meditate on thy
commandments: and I will consider thy ways. I will think of thy justifications:
I will not forget thy words.” On Easter Monday last year I chanted two daytime
hours back-to-back at a get-together with two families, including a large
number of children. I initially worried they might find it boring, and remarked
on how repetitive Psalm CXVIII is. “The Law of the Lord is wonderful, but we
get it.” But that’s just it, we don’t get it. We haven’t gotten it yet.
These octaves could seem
like a broken record, the liturgical equivalent of Groundhog Day; at the end of each day you start again in the same
place you began the day before. The Church in Her wisdom knows that a mystery
such as the one which Easter commemorates is too great for one day’s
contemplation. It takes time and repetition to dive into its depths. The
liturgical mysterion immerses us in the mystery.
Further up and further in. You enter in more and more deeply, only to find that
there’s more there than you had realized. Entering in, your knowledge and
capacity for love grow, and as you grow in knowledge and love, you seem to
return to where you began with a shock of realization that you know nothing and
you love not at all in comparison with all there is to know and love. And yet
please God you do know and love just a little more than you did before.
The monotony of the Office
is one of its virtues. Reciting the psalms day in day out sanctifies our time
in part by transcending it. From the moment the Dawn from on high breaks upon
us each day in the Benedictus until the Lord lets His
servant go in peace in the Nunc dimittis, from the rising of the Sun to its setting, the liturgy
synchronizes the rhythm of time with the rhythm of eternity. Its repetition is
a preparation for and indeed the beginning of heaven, our eternal and timeless
contemplation of the One who is ever ancient yet ever new, a contemplation
which begins here and now though we see through a glass darkly.
Saint John Henry Newman
said in one Advent sermon that it is through the worship of God here on earth
in the liturgy that we must become used to God’s presence. “Just as the bodily
eye must be exercised in order to bear the full light of day,” the liturgy
accustoms us progressively to that sight which is mercifully veiled from us
now, a sight which would stop our hearts for awe. No man may see God in the
flesh and live. But “in the worship and service of Almighty God, which Christ
and His Apostles have left to us, we are vouchsafed means, both moral and
mystical, of approaching God, and gradually learning to bear the sight of Him.”
We need the liturgy then
because it is in it and through its very repetition that we are transformed and
made capable of union with God. It is that union adapted to our needs. “I come
then to church, because I am an heir of heaven,” Newman said. “It is my desire and
hope one day to take possession of my inheritance: and I come to make myself
ready for it, and I would not see heaven yet, for I could not bear to see it. I
am allowed to be in it without seeing it, that I may learn to see it. And by
psalm and sacred song, by confession and by praise, I learn my part.”
You find when you return to
the trail and to the psalms that things aren’t exactly as they were before.
Their path isn’t so much circular as it is helical, the journey following a
spiral which is both circular and linear, a circle on a line, a circle in
forward motion. You return again to the starting point, but it’s not exactly
the same because you’re not exactly the same. Sameness and difference,
familiarity and strangeness.
Our Lord has told us that
“every scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like to a man that is a
householder, who bringeth forth out of his treasure new things and old.” Both
the book of nature and the book of the psalms alike should be read in such a
way that they help the mind to advance not linearly in knowledge, but in the
more complex motion of its ascent to God.
Father Jon Tveit is a
priest of the Archdiocese of New York.