going out and coming in

The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore. Psalm 121:8 (KJV)

I’VE BOUGHT A NEW COPY of the King James Authorised Version of the Bible, glad to play a small part in celebrating its 400th anniversary in 2011. I’m old enough to have grown up steeped in the cadences of the KJV and it has shaped my faith, my reading and my poetry.

Here’s epic “tale” – from Genesis to Revelation – of a whole human society being shaped by an eternally morphing faith, a perpetual re-reading of its history, and a constantly interpreting poetry. And – to borrow an image from the poet William Stafford - the every far sound of that humanity called the listening out into places where the rest of us had never been.

There’s a great deal of anxiety in our humankind in these early years of the twenty-first century – a sometimes impossibly demanding going out and coming in. It’s plain that history repeats itself! So I shall return, in this 400th anniversary year, to some of the great texts that were inscribed upon my soul in my own earliest years … The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore … and will often, almost certainly, bring to mind the closing stanza of William Stafford’s Listening:

My father heard so much that we still stand
inviting the quiet by turning the face,
waiting for a time when something in the night
will touch us too from that other place.