I recently decided to publish something from my back catalogue: Selah! Loving the Psalms.
It should make its way to Amazon soon, in paperback and ebook. For a limited time it is available to read (free!) on my website: https://www.pjulian.net/selahlovingthepsalms.
Selah! Loving the Psalms is a collection of around 50 selected psalms (mostly excerpts, but in some cases the complete psalm) transposed to shift their focus of love and devotion away from God and towards other human beings.
I engaged in the work as a way of exploring two simple questions.
The first: why is it that God so desires our love?
The second: how would our lives (and the world in general) change if we stopped pouring out our love to a distant, jealous God, and instead gave it to other people?
Because when you really stop to think about it, it seems very strange that an omnipotent God, complete in every perfection, should be so desirous and commanding of our love, and so wrathful, violent, even murderous when it is not surrendered to Him.
A God who requires us to bow down, who rejoices when we kneel, who takes his greatest pleasure in human beings cowering before Him in worship and subjugation.
Who says: I love you, indeed I am Love; but my love for you is conditional upon you obeying me, praising me, bowing down before me and worshipping me, accepting my every power over you, even unto death?
Saying: I am everything, you are nothing, you are wretched, I am your master, this is Love.
This is a theme I have explored in previous posts.
The frank psychopathy of Jesus when he equates friendship with absolute obedience, the difference between actual compassion and the bloated imitation of love that goes out of broken souls to seek power over multitudes.
In a sense Selah! Loving the Psalms is not very different from any of my other works. They all depict people struggling to free themselves from Gods who lust to humiliate and enslave, and instead give their love to other human beings in a thousand simple, humane ways.
Surely a project that any truly loving God would be in absolute agreement with.
So that is my hope in publishing Selah! Loving the Psalms. That liberating these songs of devotion might uncenter us a little from the madness of the Old Religions, and perhaps show what might happen were our love not only reclaimed, but multiplied infinitely amongst us.
P. Julian
28 August 2018
Selah! Loving the Psalms is available in ebook and paperback on Amazon, and also for a limited time to read online (Free!) on my website: https://www.pjulian.net/selahlovingthepsalms.
The full text of this transposition is as follows:
From Psalm 137 (ii)
If I forget you, my love
Let my right hand forget its skill
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
If I forget you
If I don’t prefer you above my dearest joy -
And for the sake of completeness, here is my (very light) transposition of the better-known part of Psalm 137:
From Psalm 137 (i)
By the Rivers of Babylon
There we sat down
Yes, and we wept
When we remembered Zion
On the willows of the river
We hung up our instruments
For those who held us, they asked for our songs
Those who tormented us demanded our Songs of Joy
Sing us a song about your dearest love!
How can we sing a song of love when it is lost to us?
Bring judgement on the foolish child
Who would say this of our great love
Who would say: raze it!
Raze it even to its foundation!
By the Rivers of Babylon
There we sat down
Yea, and we wept
When we remembered Zion.