Canter Bridge

The psalmist spars with God like friend to old friend over a beer at table in their pub. It is an unsettling frankness that speaks the truth about one’s circumstance without endangering the long association that is the cement that joins such friends.

Psalms 42 and 43 are held together by this verbal link:

Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. (Psalms 42:11 and 43:5 NIV)

This refrain achieves a sophisticated self-diagnosis, at once recognizing both the depression that pervades and the inability to praise God that is its companion. Yet if the pray-er cannot praise God, he is able still to address him. That conversation comes as the rough challenge of a wronged friend:

Psalm 42: Why have your forgotten me?
Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy …
as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’

Psalm 43: Why have you rejected me?
Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?

In each case the psalmist holds out to himself the hope that he will yet praise God, that the friendship will be restored to its rugged, satisfying mutuality, that this present solitude is the experiential edge not of final abandonment but of some inscrutable interruption that will in time be reversed.

The embracing of frank talk about God’s apparent unreliability, on the one hand, and bold affirmation of hope in him, on the other, is a biblical instinct of remarkable perseverance. It sees alienation in full color, resisting the pious urge to explain it away. Yet it grasps hold of the ultimate rationality of hope in a good God that seems so threatened by the contingencies of human experience, not least the experience of that depression and humiliation which follows upon the experience of God’s absence. He is deus absconditus too often for our preference. Yet he is by his very self-designation YHWH, the God who is there, the God who is here.

All of this lends to biblical faith a linear, historical quality that flies in the face of abstraction. One moves from experience to experience. There is little stoicism here, little biting of the lip in denial of the present darkness. Rather, there is license to declare the experience of this moment, whether that is the rhetorical question that almost taunts God for his absence or the confession that there is yet reason to hope.

Life with this God, the psalms appear to suggest, is not darkness and confusion. Yet neither is it simple. It is rather a drama. Moment follows moment, layer positions itself upon layer. One walks. One makes pilgrimage.

Meanwhile, one does not suffer in self-denying silence. One speaks. One prays.