Psalm 90: a Gnostic meditation on meaning and mortality (read by an 11-year-old girl)

We’re theologically all over the place at my house, but the most regular practice of our family cult is to get drunk over Friday night dinner and read a Psalm or two while pounding the table. Psalm 90 is acutely apt for our present pandemic, and not just because of the famous reference to our allotted “three score years and ten”. I quoted it to my 77-year-old mother (don’t worry, I politely waited until the worst night sweats of her COVID-19 infection had passed).

Where else but the Psalms does a nostalgic lament for one’s homeland end with the gleeful crushing of children’s heads?

There’s something very raw and brutally honest about the Psalms. Frequently indefensible, they are ribald and ambitious, petty and petulant, dripping with vice and violence, refreshingly unfiltered in an era of guarded speech. These are the most human lines of the Bible, verses from the hearts of men afflicted with unbearable passions. Where else but the Psalms does a nostalgic lament for one’s homeland end with the gleeful crushing of children's heads? By the Rivers of Babylon…

Good moral advice is sparse, here and elsewhere in the Old Testament — if that’s what you are after you might have more luck in the Buddhism isle of the virtual bookshop. These verses are infused with and the beauty and frustration and absurdity of humanity, and the wisdom echoes down through the three millennia since they were first collected together. They speak to us — at least, they speak to me, and so I am sharing a reading of Psalm 90 by my daughter. It is over at my blog here. She has risen to the challenge of her dyslexia, don’t you agree?

For Bible readings to be fun, abandon the idea that the Lord was ever supposed to be the good guy and read through the prism of Gnosticism into the marrow of Israelite thinking. Remember YHWH’s admission through the mouth of Isaiah, where “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil”. During quarantine, why not arrange the cutlery so it clatters discordantly when the Demiurge moves you to percussion, knock back a glass or two of well-blessed red and glare at your dear ones over the table or the screen as you read from the Book of Psalms?