Blueberry Psalm

James Cathcart August 22, 2017 0 0

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Psalm 133

1 How very good and pleasant it is
    when kindred live together in unity!
2 It is like the precious oil on the head,
    running down upon the beard,
on the beard of Aaron,
    running down over the collar of his robes.
3 It is like the dew of Hermon,
    which falls on the mountains of Zion.
For there the Lord ordained his blessing,
    life for evermore.

This Psalm is like biting into a blueberry, just three verses long and fresh, sharp, and joyful! We shall return to it!

With those only familiar with the stern figure in a beret and military fatigues, the Che Guevara of The Motorcycle Diaries is a revelation. In his journal we see a wide eyed and sensitive young man getting into many comical scrapes and misadventures, on a voyage as much of self discovery as exploration. 

Guevara, much like Jesus, is better known for what he did once he’d grown out of his early 20s, but this document gives us a revealing picture. The gospels on the other hand don’t give us any information about the formative years of the twenty-something Jesus, which begs the question - what if the young Jesus had journaled? What would Jesus’s motorcycle diaries have looked like?

One is tempted to imagine Jesus and John the Baptist in their 20s, tooling around the Galilee in a patched up 500cc Norton (or perhaps just a donkey called Norton). We see Jesus leaving the comfort of his parent’s carpentry workshop and his studies - and getting to know humanity. Jesus and John dusting off their sandals and moving on, night after night, scrounging meals, picking wild berries. The young Che’s adventures include many parties and bottles of wine, and one can imagine it would too for Jesus and John. Imagine having a glimpse into life of the young Jesus, perhaps writing like Guevara, in a manner by turns, humorous, heartbreaking, ironic and revelatory as his view of the world develops.

Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries begin with the arresting lines: “This is not a story of incredible heroism, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it to be. It is a glimpse of two lives that ran parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams.”

There’s something heart-stoppingly beautiful about two lives that ran parallel for a time. Imagine these words being used to describe the gospels… used as glorious understatement to describe the incarnation of Jesus as being two lives, his and that of ours, running parallel for a time…

We turn again to the blueberry Psalm and think, “How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity.”

Dear God

Give us similar hopes

and convergent dreams

with you.

Amen.