Transparent honesty between God and humankind requires expression. One cannot have intimacy while guarding silence. It is not permitted to us both to hold our guard and dance with our creator.
Both God and man must speak if the perforated boundary between heaven and earth is to yield, if Jerusalem is to descend, if prayers are to reach the altitude where Heaven can hear.
One must pour out one’s heart:
Trust in him at all times, O people;
pour out your heart before him;
God is a refuge for us. (Psalm 62:8 NRSV)
The notion that the heart or its contents are liquid, susceptible to being poured out before another’s listening presence, owes perhaps some of its plausibility to the physical practice of ‘drink offerings’. In the psalm, human offering of life-giving nourishment to the deity is transformed into the image of a woman or a man who empties the contents of the most vital organ in an act of lavish self-emptying.
It is no accident that the prior and parallel line is a summons to trust, for such unguarded expression is a giant, existential bet placed upon the guess that the divine listener is benign, more liable to bless when he has learned everything than to stomp on the pray-er who has made himself bereft of all secrets.
Biblical spirituality feeds upon such intimacy, whether in the daily self-presentation of Levitical cult or the self-emptying pathos of that prayer that holds nothing back.
In both cases, something costly changes hands. It is the highest risk, the deepest of transactions. A heart emptied is a terribly vulnerable thing. It wonders, nearly without exception, how it will emerge from the passion of upending.
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