Psalm 19

C.S. Lewis called it the greatest poem in the Psalter — perhaps the greatest lyric poem in the world, which is a remarkable thing to say about a text that insists its subject has no words.

They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

The heavens don’t announce. They simply are — and that being is itself speech. Glory pressing through seams that weren’t meant to hold it.

Today’s reading in Through Lenten Lands with the Inklings brings us here. That’s worth sitting with. Lent tends toward the minor key — dust, want, the knowledge of our limits. Psalm 19 is anything but minor. And yet it belongs, because it ends in exactly that place:

Who can discern their own errors?

Forgive my hidden faults.

The man undone by the glory of the heavens is the same man who looks inward and cannot fully see himself. Both movements belong to the same posture. Wonder doesn’t remove the need for mercy. It deepens it.

Read it slowly today. Let the sun run its circuit. Let the law be sweet. And then let the closing prayer be yours:

May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.