51:150

Psalm 51 is clean; it is familiar. I remember singing the core stanza when I was younger, a desperate plea for God to create a new heart in me: it comes to me now through the veil of time, the memory washed pure in its own right. My eyes are closed, my heart and will undivided. Such moments of unity with ourselves and our God are common in memories of our adolescence, whether they are accurate or not.

The psalmist, however, is divided. He begins with a cry for mercy, most accurately translated, “Grace me!” To “grace” does not simply mean to offer pity, as our modern idea of mercy does, but to offer a new reality. It means this in the Hebrew, but we forget it with our notions of sin management: grace is little more than a good cleaning.

Our wickedness, however, requires something more total. The evil that clings to the core of our soul and forces us to miss our marks affects every aspect of our existence. Whether we familiarly call it sin or follow Aristotle’s term of missing the mark–hamartia–it is a metaphor for total failure, and in the original cultural sense, may refer to failure in combat, which would lead to destruction. This is hamartia, or sin: a complete breakdown of the way we relate to each other, to ourselves, to God.

Truly, the psalmist points out that the latter is the most important. While he has hurt others (this psalm is traditionally about David’s relationship with Bathsheba), the psalmist realizes that others carry their own hamartia, that God is the only judge and measure of right. David has offended, even blasphemed, Holiness itself.

What is needed is something beyond the “washing” language that the psalm refers to in verse 7, but complete re-creation. In the biblical narrative, the verb “to create” is used only of God. No one else expiates sin and brings the radical new creation–since sin has destroyed the old. Only God. The psalmist prays for a new heart and the presence of God.  This is not some ecstatic presence of transcendence, but the slow and deliberate communion between Spirit and man.

Which perhaps does entail some experience of transcendence.  I think of those high school memories singing in a stuffy basement: what I love about those memories is that my soul was one. I was not divided from myself.  My memory blocks off the angst and fear and shyness that I felt in high school, whether it was there as I sang, or whether it wasn’t.  This is the beauty of memory, as Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken” points out, because we remember ourselves as we wish and ought to be.

And what is transcendence if it is not this undividedness? Transcendence comes to us in fits and spurts because only for moments do we feel whole: in a mountain valley, at the end of a certain movie, watching a child play.  Only for moments can we escape our sin and be fully ourselves, experiencing only the moment, the pure moment.

I cannot help but think of heaven, and how our wholeness will affect not only what we do but who we are, not only what we think but how we think because there will no longer be another self divided from us.

But for now, as we flail and hope, struggle and believe, may we return to our knees before the Living God, as the psalmist does, as Isaiah did in a similar passage, and know our unworthiness with only the desperate, desperate cry of “Grace me!”  Save me, have mercy on me, wash me, create me.  Create me.  Create me.