Canter Bridge

The biblical proverbialist deploys sharp insight into the rhythms of the human heart. He knows what news ails and the report that cures, the loss that deadens the human soul and the novelty that brings it back to life.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.

If hope deferred sickens the heart, then one wonders what kind of medicine comes to us in the eighty-eighth psalm. This dark articulation of loss contains not one word of hope. Indeed it has been singled out as the only exemplar in the ‘psalms of lament’ that contains no movement towards hope’s expectation of better things. It simply chronicles the end of things, assigning the causality of catastrophe to YHWH with neither flinching nor apology.

The psalm begins, it is true, with a plea that YHWH should hear and answer:

O LORD, the God who saves me, day and night I cry out before you. May my prayer come before you; turn your ear to my cry.

Yet, in the pray-er’s experience, YHWH remains willfully deaf to his cry:

But I cry to you for help, O LORD; in the morning my prayer comes before you. Why, O LORD, do you reject me and hide your face from me?

In between this clamor of unmet need the psalmist prays aloud the shape and substance of his grief. Worst, perhaps, of all his calamities is the isolation in which he bears them.

For my soul is full of trouble and my life draws near the grave. I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am like a man without strength. I am set apart with the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom you remember no more, who are cut off from your care. You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths. Your wrath lies heavily upon me; you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.  You have taken from me my closest friends and have made me repulsive to them.

Yet one must not exaggerate. The aching psalmist is not entirely alone. One close companion remains ever at his side, however unwanted.

From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death; I have suffered your terrors and am in despair. Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me. All day long they surround me like a flood; they have completely engulfed me. You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend.

How is one to explain the fact that Israel’s prayer book embraces such dark, unheard, devastated lines?

It would seem that the pray-er’s religion has become—’net-net’ as one says—naked, tormenting hope deferred.

And yet he prays the words. We pray the words.

A fine but essential line may open up here between that sickness of the soul that is hope deferred—on the one hand—and its death by despair, on the other.

We might long for health and happiness. Yet in the valleys of one’s timeline where those bright things remain unavailable and the pursuit of them ludicrous, one can find solace in mere sickness when its alternative is death.

This is not a very modern thought, not indigenous to a moment when the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is every man’s right.

Yet it remains a lifeline until YHWH, for reasons he does not disclose, turns again and listens.