Honesty II

I have been reading two Psalms each day for quiet time; right now I am at Psalm 108.

The Psalms is a collection of songs to the Lord which encompasses the whole range of human emotion, from elation to anguish, from anger to sorrowful repentance. Look at the uninhibited cries of despair in Psalm 88:

O LORD, the God who saves me,
day and night I cry out before you.
May my prayer come before you;
turn your ear to my cry.
For my soul is full of trouble
and my life draws near the grave.
I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
I am like a man without strength.

I am set apart with the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
who are cut off from your care.
You have put me in the lowest pit,
in the darkest depths.
Your wrath lies heavily upon me;
you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.
You have taken from me my closest friends
and have made me repulsive to them.
I am confined and cannot escape;
my eyes are dim with grief.
I call to you, O LORD, every day;
I spread out my hands to you.
Do you show your wonders to the dead?
Do those who are dead rise up and praise you
Is your love declared in the grave,
your faithfulness in Destruction?
Are your wonders known in the place of darkness,
or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?
But I cry to you for help, O LORD;
in the morning my prayer comes before you
Why, O LORD, do you reject me
and hide your face from me?
From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death;
I have suffered your terrors and am in despair.
Your wrath has swept over me;
your terrors have destroyed me.
All day long they surround me like a flood;
they have completely engulfed me.
You have taken my companions and loved ones from me;
the darkness is my closest friend.

I don't know how it is in the Hebrew, but in this translation the last line has a terrifying ring of finality in the way it ends so abruptly. In general, the Psalms end fairly upbeat, in the style of "though my sorrow may last for a night, His joy comes in the morning," but this particular Psalm has the usual expected ending choked off by a vision of the encircling darkness.

But is it a menacing, malicious darkness? Are the previous cries of the Psalmist's heart accusations at all? Though there is deep sorrow and anguish in this lament, there is no tone of bitterness, nothing which indicates a sense of betrayal. The psalmist reaches no real conclusion in this outburst, except for the one he started out with: this is “the Lord, the God who saves [him].”

This Psalm is in fact a prayer (as all the Psalms are), a fact indicated near the beginning in the line “may my prayer come before you.” I am in awe of this prayer. This is not a prayer that starts in an affirmation of God’s greatness, holiness, or goodness; the person who prayed this prayer threw all conventions out of the window in the face of extreme anguish. He just assumed God’s goodness and readiness to hear his prayer—this faith released him to fully express his state of despair and isolation. I find that often I do not have the courage or honesty to bring all of myself before God. Somehow I assume that a good Christian ought to feel good before God—whatever “good” might mean. This is why I pray through journaling sometimes, because it forces me to be honest about how I really feel about God and about my life.