Psalm 54 is set when soon-to-be-King David is running from as-yet-present-King Saul. David is betrayed by the Ziphites. This is David’s life: anointed future King of Israel, defeater of Goliath, and now running for his life as Saul hunts him. When I sometimes wonder how David was seen as someone so close to God, despite his philandering and murder and activities which do not fit with this idea, I’m brought back to these moments. David lived in the crucible of suffering; he grew close to God because of the tension in his life, the waiting, the fear.
I wonder if the ease and comfort of his later life—you’ll recall he went after Bathsheba while it was time for “kings to be at war” (which he most certainly was not), contributed to his failure. It is a Shakespearean fall, with one crack leading to another until a torrent rages, and David is covering up murder and fasting for his newborn son.
But, years before that we see David suffering in the desert, hiding in the land of the Ziphites and betrayed by them: pure David and honest David, because he had no other way to live. He was reliant on God for his very life; he centered his life on God; he needed God like, as we see elsewhere, he needed water. He panted for God.
And so, when he is betrayed by the Ziphites he notes that they do not seek God: “they do not set God before themselves.”
I’m reading Diary of a Country Priest with my brother, and we talk about it on the phone from time to time. As we read the priest’s diary, we see his thoughts, his slow transformation through suffering into someone more—like God. He does not gain great focus or clarity. He hardly even gains faith, although it comes in fits and spurts. He writes:
“Faith is not a thing which one ‘loses,’ we merely cease to shape our lives by it…An educated man may come by degrees to tuck away his faith in some back corner of his brain, where he can find it again on reflection, by an effort of memory; yet even if he feels a tender regret for what no longer exists might have been, the term ‘faith’ would nevertheless be inapplicable to such an abstraction, no more like real faith, to use a well-worn simile, than the constellation of Cygnus is like a swan.”
Today, we like to think of faith as a mental process; we have melted it down to an assent of belief, a set of statements with which we must agree. And it becomes no more real than an abstraction, an idea—like a drawing (or constellation) is like the real thing. No, faith is an ordering and a shaping, a costly and real activity worked out on the plane of three-dimensional existence. We cannot afford to pare it down. I think of Mother Theresa—this great woman of faith—who for years, as it turned out, never felt God’s presence, yet labored away in the slums of Calcutta. Faith is how you shape your life—or if you allow your life to be shaped—not some tender feeling you can conjure by thinking hard enough or listening to the right music.
I’m reminded of the idea from screenwriting: A character is what he does. Not what he thinks. In the end, says the psalmist, says the priest, faith is the sometimes awkward and sometimes beautiful setting of God before ourselves—not just mentally but in a way that waits through suffering, that keeps acting even when belief is not there; David knows he was anointed and painfully waits for the crown, praying and hoping and being changed all the while.
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