57:150

It is night, and there is snow on the ground and the trees. Walter Brueggemann speaks of the Psalms as prayers of dislocation and reorientation, and today has been a day of reorientation. May parents visited, and we went out to lunch before coming back to our house to talk: my sister’s upcoming trip to Costa Rica, the events of this last week for my dad, plans for when Brooke will give birth sometime over the next few weeks. Later, Ellis and I wrestled on the living room floor. I threw her in the air and taught her how to walk on her hands while I held her feet; we put together the same puzzle twice.

So, as the psalmist in Psalm 57 prays for God to grace him, I think of how God has. This is the prayer we read in English: Be merciful to me, but it most closely might be a guttural cry: Grace me. Grace, for the Hebrews did simply mean forgiveness, but the transference of a new reality. Later, after crying for grace the psalmist tells God, “In the shadow of thy wings I seek shelter / Till calamities have passed by.” God is present; the psalmist speaks of a new reality behind the reality of the moment.

The poet may be borrowing Near Eastern mythology here–an image of a mother bird. Some ancient Egyptian creation myths speak of a creator bird, and today we hold the remnants of associating birds with birth when we talk about storks carrying swaddled babies in their beaks. But, the bird for the psalmist signals both closeness–like a mother bird brooding over her hen–and transcendence. Later in the Bible, we see the Spirit descending like a dove: close, gentle, peaceful, and able to transcend this earth.

We celebrate this closeness in our modern churches and modern music, but we too rarely move beyond it. In my prayers and pleas, my murmured longings, rote recitations, and anxious demands, I too rarely move beyond it. I want God’s wings, God’s closeness: I want to find shelter and rest until the calamities have passed. I want God to act miraculously: to remove pain and suffering and even more, inconvenience.

I forget the refrain of this psalm: “O God, rise above the heavens! Let thy glory shine on the whole earth!” I forget that God does not exist for me, and too often drop into what Samuel Terrien calls “egocentric sentimentalism.” Closeness without transcendence.

It is easy to do this when much of my life is void of suffering, especially in a historical context, when it is common for Saturdays to be days or reorientation and relaxation. It is easy to do this when our Sunday morning songs are about how much God loves me (which I believe is true), but little more. While we become stunted without love and it is one of our deepest desires, we become equally stunted without lament–if we do not lament, we are not present in this world–and without worship. And worship, rather than being untrue, may be most true when it is urgent and needed, like when the psalmist literally commands: God, rise up.

The beauty of the night is a reminder of the tension between this present reality and a greater one that encompasses it: the snow is beautiful and severe, comforting and cold. We do well to hold both in hand, to reflect on both, to live fully in both through laughter and lament: for only then can we honestly pray with the psalmist: God, rise up.