Canter Bridge

The writer of the seventy-third psalm knew despair’s sharp appeal.

Like a well-aged cheese with a hefty kick, despair turns over in the mouth with complex maturity. A man feels just a bit more in touch with the real world as he submits to the sophistication it claims for itself.

The psalmist will counter despair’s undeniable charms by teaching us that bitterness is both destructive to those who come after us and folly when the smoke clears.

Still, it would be wrong to rush too clumsily to those remediating truths. We first owe to despair a patient listen as it stakes its claim to reality:

Truly God is good to the upright, to those who are pure in heart.
But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled; my steps had nearly slipped.
For I was envious of the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
For they have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek.
They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people.
Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them like a garment.
Their eyes swell out with fatness; their hearts overflow with follies.
They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression.
They set their mouths against heaven, and their tongues range over the earth.
Therefore the people turn and praise them, and find no fault in them.
And they say, “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?”
Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches.
All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence.
For all day long I have been plagued, and am punished every morning. (Psalm 73:1-14 NRSV)

Only a fanatic or a novice would dismiss the plausibility of despair’s case. It argues as persuasively in the bustle of the street as it whispers in the quiet of one’s bedroom.

There is no sense—it pieces together its claim from no dearth of evidence—in clinging to simple fictions like truth. Like justice. A God who rules the world and turns it aright. These are things you might have once believed, but you’re older now. Grown up. Adolescent utopias no longer cloud your eyes.

‘Get with the program!’, despair eventually insists to any who is not immediately taken in by its proofs. The tellers of lies are seldom patient against resistance or, even, deliberation. Despair is no exception.

The psalmist’s twin response—it would wrong to call it his argument, for it is much more a testament than that—begins with a backward glance at those who stomp rock and tread mud behind us on the path our feet have cleared. These have a right to expect more from us than easy consent to despair’s siren. We owe them a bit of fortitude, despite the breadth of our doubt:

If I had said, ‘I will talk on in this way,’ I would have been untrue to the circle of your children.

The poet does not deny a place to the soul’s deliberations. Yet to prolong them and to broadcast them is irresponsible when the fate of others who follow the hunch of our shoulders into the blowing storm is at stake. Bumping up against inauthenticity but not granting it full voice, the psalmist alerts us to the fact of consequence, that limitation with which community always eventually impinges upon our freedom.

We are not free to despair, the writer seems to say, if this is the best argument that despair can mount. People are watching, and they matter.

And then the psalmist narrates the heuristic potency of worship. We cannot see through the data that both bombard and confuse if we have been too long absent from YHWH’s temple, his experience suggests. This world has its own light, yet there is another, necessary illumination that comes from above. Without it, we are doomed to see the shape of monsters in the dusky passing of mere clouds.

But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task,
until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end.
Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin.
How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors!
They are like a dream when one awakes; on awaking you despise their phantoms.
When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart,
I was stupid and ignorant; I was like a brute beast toward you.
Nevertheless I am continually with you; you hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me with honor.
Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Intimacy, as we are instructed far more explicitly elsewhere, is fear’s opposite. Perfect love casts out fear. When despair—a mere bullet-point in fear’s loud argument—gets chucked out with its daddy, people shake themselves awake and wonder for a moment at the vividness of the bad dream just ended.

The sophistication that is felt in savoring despair is folly dressed up for a party. Strip it for moment of its cheap tie and its soiled, tawdry undershirt peeks out.

For the truly crushed in spirit, the psalms draw close with exquisite, long-suffering words of comfort.

But for us who too easily respect despair’s puffed-up mediocrity as though it were an evening at the Met, it has a firmer word: ‘Show some spine and get a life.’