I want to tell you a little bit about my experience with Psalms.
For a long time, I knew just Psalm 23, and fragments of some of the others. When I tried actually reading whole psalms at random, I was horrified. So much anger! So much violence!
It seemed to me that the generic psalm read something like:
God, you are so wonderful,
and the sky and the hills are so beautiful,
and I have been so happy with you,
but now I am miserable,
I’ve got tears in my ears from lying in my bed crying,
the rich and the powerful people locked me up,
and they’re laughing at me and my deepest divine center,
so wake up! rouse yourself! rise up!
bring down the proud and the mighty,
grind them into dust
and bash out their babies’ brains against the wall,
and hurry up! do you think I’ll be praising you after I’m dead?
and stop being mad at me,
I didn’t do it,
and if I did I’m sorry
and I won’t do it again,
and you have been so good to me,
saving me out of Egypt
and guiding my feet
and you are majestic
and you have made me happy
forever.
Lots of mood swings there! A real rapid-cycling bipolar religion. Not too comfortable for a nice suburban girl with anger management challenges.
So I went back to cutting and pasting the loving merciful bits, and skipping the rest.
And then one day my husband died after a prolonged and painful illness. I had felt God abandoning us about six weeks into the pain, and I felt abandoned and angry. And in my grief I started surfing the internet, and I discovered there’s an official category: the Psalms of Lament.
The idea is, those old Hebrews in their temple, they used to sing the psalms. One at a time. All the way through. As part of the religious service. They used to stand there, in the Temple, all dressed up for church, with the priest leading them, and say:
For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise? (Ps 2)
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest. (Ps 22)
You have made us like sheep for slaughter, and have scattered us among the nations. You have sold your people for a trifle, demanding no high price for them. (Ps 44)
I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God. (Ps 69)
Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction? (Ps 88)
And God, evidently, did not smite them dead. They went on through the rest of the mood swings in that psalm, and then they went home for a week of wresting their bread from the earth, and came back again next week for another psalm-singing.
Anger, frustration, a suspicion that God is sleeping—these were not reasons for abandoning religion. God didn’t throw them out, and the committee on right thinking didn’t throw them out. They were saying the holy words. It was part of prescribed ritual to express bad feelings about God, right there in front of everybody, all together in the temple.
I had been entertaining a kind of non-powerful notion of God: I experienced God as love, kindness, wonder, beauty. But I did not think that God was really in charge of things like, well, you know, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima, and famine, and the abuse of children. God as well-meaning and highly motivating, and on the right side, but not really a player. Maybe just a sort of relationshippy cloudy nonexistence ... a moral compass but not a steering rudder or ship builder.
But when Chuck died after all those weeks of pain, I was mad. And my anger told me that somewhere, deep inside, there was a part of me that did believe God is in charge, and holds God accountable.
So what I got from these psalms was another layer in my vast and ill-assorted and mutually contradictory heap of ideas about God. In this layer, God has power. Big power. Things happen that are really bad. We totally don’t understand how this happens. We’re not going to stand around theorizing that all those bad things are really for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Instead, we’re going to tell God what we think.
And God will listen. And we will still be God-people, with God’s name written in our hearts. God will not throw us out, no matter how angry we get. It’s probably better to be mad about the injustice and the suffering, when we know that God is for justice and kindness, than to shrug and say, “oh, it’s God’s will.”
So what I learned is a little bit of courage in relationship—not just with God, but also with people. Imagine if there are people who will permit anger to be part of a relationship ... who will not throw you out or freeze you out or depersonalize you when you get mad.
Imagine if, when someone else gets mad, you are big enough and strong enough to stand there and listen, and hold on to your love, and consider whether they have a right to be angry. Or not.
Now, I’m still working on the baby-brain-bashing bit. But what I’ve learned is that the entire range of human emotions (not actions) belongs in an authentic relationship with God. You don’t have to have only certain feelings to be able to walk with God. You can stay on the sacred path no matter what you’re feeling: pain, blind rage, despair, low self-esteem, as well as joy, awe, wonder, kindness, and steadfast love.
I don’t think there is any human emotion that isn’t in the Psalms. It’s all part of the way we walk and talk with the Holy One. We’re welcomed and invited, in our full humanity. And we can create relationships, loving relationships with other people, where our entire human range of emotion, our whole pathos, is welcomed and welcoming.
Praise God’s Holy Name.
