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Reflections on Psalm 42

Introduction

During my Senior year at Haverford College, our chamber choir recorded a CD. One of the songs was contemporary setting of Psalm 42 by William Hawley, an American composer. We had performed several of his songs previously, and our conductor commissioned this setting for our choir.

Psalm 42 has always been one of my favorite psalms, and singing it that whole year kept its message in my mind – longing and isolation from God, suffering, and hope. The next year while I was studying in Israel, I had the chance to travel, discovering a new context for the Psalm. Where I had envisioned bucolic green pastures and flowing streams, as found in my native Western New York, I now saw deserts with scarce water. Sometimes you can’t even see the water but only its effects or plants with roots into underground streams.

In the many rolls of film I took that year and in later trips, some of my favorite photos have been of this barren landscape where life still manages to hold on and water shows up at surprising times.

While the music plays, the photos shift from the desert, where we see minimal water but the traces of its effects, to the Dead Sea – full of water, but inhospitable for any life, to the Ein Gedi oasis, next to the Dead Sea where you climb up through the ravine and turn the corner to find waterfalls.

Play Movie (.mov - it's a large file - I'm working on reducing the size)

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Last Modified: 04/12/2006