“This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”

Maybe the best-known verse from Psalm 118, these words are often taken out of context to mean, essentially, “Rise and shine, let’s appreciate this good moment!”

I use it that way all the time, to my children and colleagues, because I am annoyingly cheerful in the morning and it rolls off the tongue and, too, that meaning is not wholly inaccurate.

But there’s a lot more to it. The psalmist has been through some serious shit to get to this day. The moment of joy comes after a lot of pain and loss.

This country is about to see a spike in deaths from Covid-19. It is going to be grim, and then get worse. “They compassed me about like bees,” remembers the psalmist. “Thou hast thrust sore at me that I might fall.”

Eventually this pandemic will be, like the enemies in the psalm, “quenched as the fire of thorns.”

Along the way we need to disdain despair and find joy where we can (in the words of another poet, “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive”). We need to keep working together. We will get to that better day.

Notes:

* This psalm is disturbingly violent, as is much of the Tanakh. A lot of nations get destroyed in the name of the Lord. I randomly read Joshua not long ago and it was like the transcript from a war-crimes trial.

* Michael Munger and I were on WUNC’s State of Things when I dropped a bible verse into the conversation. He said, “Ed Cone, quoting scripture!” Me: My people did write it. Munger: “Well, first draft.” Tooshay, Munger.

* I remember sharing a contextually appropriate moment around the famous verse with Marjorie E. Gooding on the day we planted a tree for Calvin at Haverford.

* What a great poem this is! “All nations compassed me about…They compassed me about; yea, they compassed me about.”

* There’s a fair amount of throat-clearing in the psalms and I sometimes skip to the action so it took me a while to notice that this one is addressed to the house of Aaron, of which I am allegedly a descendant, so just passing it along.

* This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.