O God, we have heard with our
ears, our fathers have told us,
what deeds you performed in
their days, in the days of old:
you with your own hand drove out the nations, but
them you planted;
you afflicted the peoples, but
them you set free;
for not by their own sword did they win the
land, nor did their own arm save them,
but your right hand and your
arm, and the light of your face,
for you delighted in them…
But you have rejected us and
disgraced us and have not gone out with our armies.
You have made us turn back from the foe, and
those who hate us have gotten spoil.
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.
All this has come upon us, though
we have not forgotten you,
and we have not been false to
your covenant.
Our heart has not turned
back, nor have our steps departed from your way;
yet you have broken us in the place of jackals
and covered us with the shadow of death.
If we had forgotten the name of our God or
spread out our hands to a foreign god,
would not God discover this?
For he knows the secrets of
the heart…
Awake! Why are you sleeping,
O Lord? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever!
Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget
our affliction and oppression?
For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our
belly clings to the ground.
Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the
sake of your steadfast love.
Psalm 44
Reflection – This is, perhaps, not a psalm
most people are deeply familiar with, nor particular drawn to take up and pray
on a regular basis. That’s OK, I think – while every word of Scripture is of
divine origin and has its irreducible value and sacredness on that account, not
every word of it easily adapts to personal prayer on that account.
This psalm,
though, draws attention to the very real experience that comes to almost
everyone sooner or later, of meaningless purposeless and truly unjust
suffering. We can all accept (reluctantly) that if we make bad choices and mess
up our life, there will be suffering that ensues from that. It may be on the
small level of driving carelessly and so having a fender bender, drinking to
excess and having a hangover, or much more serious and protracted problems.
Most of us
can also accept that at times suffering is simply the entry fee of loving in
this world. If you want to be a loving caring person, then the problems and
sorrows of the people you love become in some degree your problems and sorrows.
You cannot really love without a few tears being shed. Most people who opt for
the ‘love’ side of the equation of life come to terms with and accept that
particular calculus early on. It is better to love and cry a little or a lot
than to live a loveless cold life.
But then
there is this experience of suffering that doesn’t easily fit into either of
the above very broad categories. The strange and painful plunge into mental or
physical illness that may have more to do with pulling a bad number in the
genetic lottery than anything else. Terrible turns of fortune that at times
explode in our lives with Job-like intensity. Terrible sequences of deaths
among family and friends, loss of job, loss of housing, loss of relationships…
all these things at time become a tsunami of suffering in our lives, and it
doesn’t much make sense, doesn’t seem to have much to do with our relative
merits and demerits, to say the least.
It is no
wonder that in every human traditional culture there is a sense that it is
possible for a person to be accursed—we all know people (and maybe some reading
this are that person) whose lives just go from one disaster to the next. And I
would hold, simply, that there is some truth to that universal human belief.
But Psalm 44
bids us to bring this terrible aspect of the human experience to the God who is
shrouded in deep mystery in the heart of it all. The psalm does not offer one
particle of illumination about any of it (this is why it is not an especially
popular one) but simply lays it out as an unsolvable mystery (which to us it
is) and then utters the desperate cry of the human soul to God in the face of
that mystery: Awake, O God! Why are you sleeping? Why do you hide your face?
Redeem us, because of your love!
And… that’s
where it is left. And this is not a bad place to leave it. We don’t know, cannot
know, the real whys and wherefores of our lives and why things are the way they
are. What we know of these matters is a small sliver of the whole of reality,
and we have no way to access the bigger picture, unless it is to contemplate
the biggest picture God has given us, which is the Passion, Death, and Resurrection
of Jesus Christ.
But even in
that, we are left crying out, trusting that the God who did this for us has a
way to redeem us no matter how grim the situation looks. And this is at times
the most we can get to—He loves us and proves that by Jesus Christ, so there
must be a way through this current darkness into redeeming love. And Psalm 44
bids us to keep crying out until He rises in and for us, and leads us into the
light of his love.
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