My latest in The Melbourne Anglican
Sunday, March 1, 2015 at 01:08AM If I were a New Year resolution making person, which I’m not, my humble, manageable resolve in 2015 would be to learn my favourite Psalm – number 139 – by heart.
It’s not a very original choice – lots of faithful people love this psalm with its sublime lines such as:
Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there…
Even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.
…Even the darkness is not dark to you; (a line I clung to through times of depression); and
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Descended from generations of Presbyterians, I have a natural affinity for the psalms, which were the only songs that some of the stricter brands of Presies were allowed to sing in worship back in the day. I’ve also spent time in Benedictine monasteries, where the monks recite their way through the entire book of Psalms each month.
The thing I love most about the psalms is their brutal, sometimes ugly honesty. My favourite bit of Psalm 139 is the lines that are omitted in the common lectionary and left out by most people reading it aloud in church, verses 19-22. Get a load of this venom:
O that you would kill the wicked, O God, that the bloodthirsty [nice irony there] would depart from me…Do I not hate those who hate you O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
With even deeper irony, the writer ends the psalm, immediately after these vicious lines, with the request: See if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Trust me, this is by no means the most bloodthirsty of the psalms. There’s the one (Psalm 137) that talks about bashing babies heads against the rocks, for instance. The thing I treasure about these ancient, confronting, heart-rending prayers, however, is that they hide nothing from God. The writer’s words to God travel from praise, rapture and wonder to hatred and fury and back again.
As a young woman growing up in the sixties and seventies, the unspoken rule was that anger was not permitted. Neither was sadness. Nice Christian girls pretended they were happy and they certainly didn’t get mad. We now know the crippling psychological cost of this.
My encounter with the psalms as a young and not so young Christian woman taught me that I could be honest with God when I was seething with rage or numb with despair just as much as when I felt joyful and loving. It taught me what the ancient Hebrews appear to have known instinctively – that no emotion I can dredge up will discombobulate God. God wants me to be real, rather than nice. Doesn’t matter what I direct God’s way, God can take it.
Reader Comments (3)
How true that God allows us to talk honestly to him, with him. Therefore if we are angry, as the Psalms did, we can speak out to him. In doing so we may well get back to praise.
Do you know Walter Brueggemann's book 'Israel's Praise'? In his introduction he describes the Psalms as "world-making" in much the same way Jesus' preaching of the Reign of God shapes a Christian's world and hopes. He says, "... I have explored the ways in which praise may be free of idolatry and ideology. The way I have proposed is to read and sing the Psalms of praise "back down" to pain, where hope lives; to hurt, where newness surfaces; to death, where life is strangely given." (p. xi) Worth a look though he doesn't mention Psalm 139 unfortunately.
We were just talking about these 2 Psalms in our lenten study last week. For the young people I was with it appeared to be liberating that it was ok to get angry and rant to God. Psalms 139 is my favourite as well. It is the Psalm that supported and nourished me as I went through my PoD - a special psalm indeed.