Psalms 145:5 · World English Bible
Psalms 145:5 Meaning I Will Meditate on the Glorious Majesty
I will meditate on the glorious majesty of your honor, on your wondrous works.
What does Psalms 145:5 mean?
Tafakkur: Reflection Al-Ghazali gave a whole book of his Revival to this slow turning of the mind over what God has made. Praise can stay on the surface: a few loud words, then back to the day.
From the Sufism reading below.
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The same verse, read by one tradition.
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Tafakkur: Reflection Al-Ghazali gave a whole book of his Revival to this slow turning of the mind over what God has made. Praise can stay on the surface: a few loud words, then back to the day. Holding attention on one thing until it sinks in takes time, and that time moves a person from naming God to seeing him.
Āyāt: Signs The Quran calls the things God made signs, marks that point past themselves. A person can watch a sunrise and feel a lift that has faded by lunchtime, because the feeling stopped at the sunrise. Taken as signs, the same things send the wonder onward to the one behind them, and the lift finally has somewhere to land.
Tajallī: Self-disclosure In Ibn Arabi's reading, everything made is a place where God shows something of himself. That turns a list of impressive events into news about the one who did them: this much power, this much care, this much patience. Someone's actions over years tell you their character, and sitting with these works does the same.
Jalāl: Majesty Sufi writers set God's majesty beside his beauty, the overwhelming side next to the side that draws you close. Dwelling on the majesty shrinks whatever a person has been treating as huge: the argument at work, the slight replayed for weeks. Those things stay, but at their own size, and the relief of that is why people keep coming back to it.
Hayba: Awe The tradition names hayba as the hush that falls on a person standing before something far larger than themselves. Fear makes you back away, while this holds you still and quiet, the way people go quiet at the edge of the ocean. When it arrives, the urge to perform drops off, and a person is simply there, meaning every word they say.
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Live Psalms 145:5 today
- Take one thing today, a tree on your street, your own hands, the light at six, and stay with it for two minutes without photographing it. Let it point somewhere past itself.
- When someone shows you something they made or something they love, ask a second question instead of saying nice. Stay long enough to see what it says about them.
- Before the hard conversation, stand at a window and give one minute to something far bigger than the conversation. The thing stays real, just at its own size.
What have I been treating as huge that would shrink if I looked up first?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching 25
Follow the thing back: the person stands on the earth, the earth under heaven, heaven under the Tao. Attention is meant to travel past what it lands on.
Zen
At first a mountain is just a mountain, then it is more than a mountain, then it is a mountain again. Staying with one thing until it opens up changes what you are looking at.
Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius
He kept turning the whole sky and the sweep of time over in his mind, and found his own grievances cut down to their real size.
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