The Psalm I Copied Until I Believed It
Ninety mornings of the same words, handwriting my way to faith.
My grandmother's Bible smelled of peppermint and pencil shavings, and for two years after she died I could not open it. It sat on my kitchen shelf between the cookbooks, black leather gone soft as an old wallet, and I dusted around it the way you avoid the eyes of someone you owe money.
Nan raised me. My mother left when I was six, in a blue Corolla I can still draw from memory, and Nan simply moved my bed into her sewing room and never once made a speech about it. She made oatmeal. She made rules. She made me go to church until I was seventeen and old enough to argue, and when I argued she said, fine, but you'll be up for breakfast anyway.
She died on a Thursday in March, quietly, in the chair by her window, with the radio on. The nurse said she probably felt nothing. I felt everything, all at once... and then, for a long time, nothing at all. I did not pray at the funeral. I mouthed the hymns like a hostage.
The Bible came to me in a cardboard box with her clip-on earrings and a tin of buttons. I kept the buttons on my desk. The Bible went on the shelf, and there it stayed until last spring, when my landlord sold the building and I had to pack my whole life into a rented van.
That was when the rubber band snapped.
It had been holding a fat spiral notebook against the back cover, and the notebook hit the floor and fanned open, and I sat down on a box of plates and started to read.
Psalm 30. In her handwriting.
Dated at the top: 4 February 1987. Then again, 5 February 1987. Then again... Page after page, year after year, the same psalm, copied out whole, every morning, in blue ballpoint that pressed so hard you could read it from the back of the page. The year my grandfather died, she had started copying it, and as far as I could tell she had never really stopped.
I sat in that emptied apartment until it got dark, reading the same twelve verses two hundred times. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.
Her handwriting changed across the decades. It got smaller. It got shakier... It never got careless.
At two in the morning, surrounded by boxes, I typed scripture writing practice into a search bar, because I needed to know if this was a thing people did or a thing only she did. It is a thing people do. There are printable plans. There are ninety day schedules with little checkboxes. I am not proud of what convinced me... but it was the checkboxes.
I decided I would copy Psalm 30 for ninety mornings. Not because I believed it... Because she had, and I wanted to know what she knew.
Morning one, my hand cramped by verse four. I write everything on a phone; my cursive had rotted like an unused language. I used her pen, a click pen from a bank that closed in 2009, and I copied the psalm at my new kitchen table and felt nothing except mild embarrassment and the beginning of a callus.
Morning nine, I noticed the kettle. You cannot copy scripture in a hurry. The words come out at the speed of your hand, which is the speed of a person walking, and while I walked through the verses the kettle ticked and the radiator knocked and the light moved across the table. It was the first time in two years I had sat still on purpose.
Morning twenty two, I got angry. I hit the line about God turning mourning into dancing and I put the pen down hard enough to dent the table. Nobody had turned my mourning into anything. My mourning sat on a shelf between the cookbooks.
I skipped two days and felt like I had let her down, which annoyed me, because she was dead and beyond disappointment, and I copied it again on the third day anyway, pressing hard enough to read from the back of the page.
Somewhere in there I stopped counting mornings and started reading her notebook alongside my own, matching her dates to what I knew of her life. And on a page dated the week my uncle Robert died, her firstborn, gone at forty four, I found the entry that broke me open.
The handwriting is terrible. The lines slope downhill. And in the margin, in letters so small I needed my phone light, she had written:
I do not believe a word of this today. Writing it anyway.
I read that margin note maybe fifty times. My grandmother, the sturdiest believer I have ever known, the woman who ironed her church blouse on Saturday nights like a soldier polishing boots, did not believe a word of it that week.
And she wrote it anyway.
Not as a performance. As a practice. She copied the joy she could not feel the way you keep watering a plant that looks dead, because you are not the one who decides when roots give up.
Faith, it turns out, can be traced before it can be felt, the way a child learns the alphabet by writing over dotted lines until one day the letters stand up on their own.
After that, the mornings changed. I stopped copying at the psalm and started copying through it. Around morning sixty, the line about dancing caught me again, but differently this time, because I suddenly remembered her in the kitchen with the radio on, Sam Cooke, a wooden spoon in her hand, doing a small shuffling two step while the oatmeal thickened.
She had buried a husband and a son and she still danced to the radio on Tuesday mornings. That was not denial. That was the psalm, working slowly, the way handwriting works.
I cried into the notebook and the ink feathered and I left it that way.
For two years I had written around what happened, in the way you drive around a road closure without ever looking at it. That week I finally wrote about the grief itself, straight at it, in my own words instead of King David's. It came out as a poem, which surprised me, because I am an accounts manager and nobody has ever accused me of poetry. It was about a blue Corolla, a tin of buttons, and a woman dancing in a kitchen. On morning ninety, with the last checkbox filled, I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, mostly so it would exist somewhere outside my kitchen.
It did not win.
I checked the results at work, and I laughed, and I heard her voice say, well, you'll be up for breakfast anyway.
Here is what ninety mornings actually bought me. Not certainty. I still argue with the ceiling some nights. But belief, I have learned, is less like a light switch and more like hope with a routine: it shows up before it is felt, it sits down at the table, it holds the pen.
Morning ninety one, I copied the psalm again. No plan told me to. The kettle was ticking, the light was crossing the table, and the pages still smelled faintly of peppermint. In the margin, in letters small enough that whoever finds my notebook will need a light, I wrote: Some mornings I believe every word of this. Writing it anyway.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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