Psalm 62

Today’s Psalm 62 contains lines about God as a mighty fortress.  All I have to do is see that one word and I’m automatically forwarded to the Luther hymn.  While the hymn is apparently a paraphrase of Psalm 46, as a layman the association here is almost as strong. All the lines in our faith get filtered through so many layers of translation—out of Hebrew, maybe into Latin, into Luther’s German and back to us in English. And we look at our layers of English translation, where the word of God makes a series of stops before it reaches us.  First in King James—well actually Tyndale before that—through the Revised Standard Version into whatever PCUSA chooses to use these days.  And of course the Bible quotes itself constantly, so the echo effect—the psalm doesn’t read as Luther’s words, but some partial reminder of it.  That may be a function of paraphrasing in the 16^th or 20^th century, or a function of paraphrasing in the ancient times these texts were composed. 

This weekend my stepson came back from church camp and was noodling on his keyboard.  He has been experimenting with some music composition (or is it assembly) software on his keyboard and then brought our electronic keyboard into his room where eventually we’ll connect as a controller.  He’s never studied piano, but can pick out pretty complicated things out by ear when he’s interested.  Mostly video game songs.  But he also improvises.  We just let him go, free range.  Try never to shush him.

That Friday night, my wife and I both thought we caught a strain of A Mighty Fortress in the middle of his noodling.  I think it was the second phrase, which marches down the scale with one step back. She asked him to play it again but he couldn’t or wouldn’t go back. Most of what they sing at camp seems to be contemporary group worship songs, songs I don’t know but everyone at say UKirk (PCUSA’s campus ministry) knows.  Not the old hymns.  But maybe they sneak in a few. Or maybe he does remember it from a church service.  Or is it such a natural progression that one stumbles into it, like the chromatic chord progression I once found that seems to come from Rosenkavalier?  Memory and instinct help keep us tied together. Maybe in spite of ourselves.