A Carolina Psalter
by Tony Scully
A Carolina Psalter
Copyright © 2019 Tony Scully. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-5140-3
hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-5141-0
ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-5142-7
Manufactured in the U.S.A. December 13, 2019
For the Psalms, I chose The American Standard Version (ASV) for its language and its remarkable history. The ASV is in universal public domain. The ASV is rooted in the Revised Version (RV), a 19th-century British revision of the King James Version of 1611. In 1870, an invitation was extended to American religious leaders for scholars to work on the RV project. A year later, Protestant theologian Philip Schaff chose 30 scholars representing the denominations of Baptist, Congregationalist, Dutch Reformed, Friends, Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Protestant Episcopal, and Unitarian. The ASV is the basis of the Revised Standard Version, 1971, the Amplified Bible, 1965, the New American Standard Bible, 1995, and the Recovery Version, 1999. A fifth revision, known as the World English Bible, was published in 2000 and was placed in the public domain. Note: where advisable, I changed the word, “Jehovah,” to “God,” to reflect common usage.
For the poems, A Carolina Psalter by Anthony Patrick Scully is registered with the Library of Congress. Registration Number: TXu 2-116-370
to Joy Claussen
Good Wife and Star
You shine within us, outside us—even darkness shines—when we remember
—The Lord’s Prayer, translated from the Aramaic
Preface
In the tumultuous spirit of the American South, A Carolina Psalter offers an outspoken conversation with King David’s Psalms, great outcries to a personal God. The Psalms, as a transformational work, sing out in the confident voice of a people unafraid to address the deity almost as an equal, and in some cases, as a friend. The poems in A Carolina Psalter address the God of the Psalms with questioning, irreverence, and occasional confrontation as we move into new understandings of Spirit. If we wish, we can experience the Psalms, indeed all the Bible, as living poetry, its metaphors breathing vibrant new life into our souls. Tony Scully’s poems challenge what he calls “the war God of tradition,” often questioning whether that God, so often on the front lines of revenge and destroying one’s enemies, if not altogether absent during periods of loss and disaster, can possibly be God at all. His poems, although reflecting current thought and practice concerning the omnipresence of Spirit, spring from a well-founded history of believers, indeed, from the Bible itself, acknowledging the divine presence within. They assert the authority of the individual voice in a search for a God beyond accepted boundaries and definitions.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the following people for their assistance with the publication of A Carolina Psalter: to my wife, Joy Claussen Scully for her constant support; to Richard Brown, Director of the University of South Carolina Press, who put me in touch with Wipf & Stock; to the Reverend Dr. William F. (“Chip”) Summers for his infinite wisdom in all matters secular and profane; to Marty Daniels for her unerring eye and typical good judgment, especially with my Introduction; to Earl Bryant, MD for his sense of reality after a lifetime of practicing medicine; to Drew Casper, PhD, University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts for his enthusiasm for my work, even for my worst instincts; to Nina ffrench-Frazier von Eckardt, critic extraordinaire; to Ponza and Robert Vaughan, the best of friends and readers.
Introduction
With A Carolina Psalter and my poems in conversation with the Psalms, I felt it was time to speak. The Psalms, some of them almost 2500 years old, have been with us in the Judeo-Christian tradition in every worship service, every prayer meeting, and every Mass for generation upon generation, their lyrical beauty manifest. As we become increasingly fixated on nuclear weapons and armaments, however, we cannot avoid inevitable questions. Why are we constantly at war? Even as we pray in good faith, do we pray to a war god? If God is our bulwark, as the Psalms maintain, why are so many of the best of us addicted to fighting? Why so much gun violence? Why so much addiction? Why so many suicides? Who is this God the Bible presents to us?
The pervasive kindness of believers in small towns and cities across the American South suggests they are deeply touched by Scripture. From prayers to the Heavenly Father and group discussions about Jesus come armies of compassionate, world-serving people who serve the homeless, the hungry, the grieving, and the incarcerated with warm hearts and the best of intentions. For many others, however, the Bible sets forth outmoded or impossible absolutes, from injunctions about the place of women and slaves, to the doctrine that Jesus is divine, to the imperative that we destroy our enemies.
Literal interpretation of the Bible may be the least of it. The argument is not about whether Eve ate a literal apple with a literal snake beside her, or whether Noah really built an ark. The question is about God. Who is this being? What is the nature of God? Many of the most progressive minds on the planet hardly believe in Spirit at all. Others address a Father God. Why is God a Father, a sometimes-threatening term for many, even if Jesus called him that? Others argue for God as Mind or Creative Source. Whole theologies, perhaps not intentionally, describe a spiritual universe predicated on good versus evil: the forces of light versus the forces of darkness. These interpretations run deep in our DNA and show up in our prayers and in our Scripture. In many cases, this duality seems to underpin and reinforce well-intentioned theological thinking—feeding into national and international conflicts and unrest, as in “God is on our side.”
We are increasingly a nation at war. Extended wars. We are four percent of the world’s population; we spend more money on defense than the next ten countries combined. Are we creating yet another empire? Where are we going? And who is this God of the Psalms that seems to be in the thick of it, savaging our enemies? Yes, we do pray, “the Lord is my shepherd,” surely a more benign presence, but he would seem insufficient for the argument. His alter ego, like unto Zeus, seems to dominate the proceedings.
As a young man, I became a Jesuit when I joined the Society of Jesus, an event that set me on an almost unending spiritual quest. The Jesuits, then as now, were committed to social justice and to scholarship, which is not to say every denomination, religious order, congregation, and sect does not embrace its own philosophies about what galvanized its founders; namely, the worship of God as they understood God. The Calvinists, as one example, following their understanding of God, are passionate about building a better and more equitable Earth. We are not so different.
The advancing conservatism in the Catholic Church in the seventies and eighties effectively closed down open-minded theological scholarship and discussion in American Catholic colleges and universities. During that period, when an almost ferocious evangelical movement seemed determined to influence local and national politics, the question, “Who is God?” sounded almost heretical. Believers knew for sure who God was. If the Bible didn’t tell them so, they knew absolutely that the Holy Spirit was the guiding presence in the Christian church and family. Even the most hidebound understood the commonality of the different Christian communities and were beginning to open themselves to the idea that non-Christians were worshipping the same God.
For some of us, self-professed spiritualists