Psalm 88: 7-10
You have put me in the lowest pit,
in the darkest depths.
Your wrath lies heavily on me;
you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.
You have taken from me my closest friends
and have made me repulsive to them.
I am confined and cannot escape;
my eyes are dim with grief.
I like to think of the Psalms as the place in Scripture to find beautiful hymns and prayers of praise and thanksgiving to a benevolent and merciful God. Even in the few Psalms of lament, I always thought that the Psalmist would clearly find redemption in the end. So, I was rather unsettled when I was asked to write a Lenten reflection on Psalm 88, a Psalm filled with pain, confusion and struggle, and no apparent acknowledgment of God’s mercy in response to the Psalmist’s cries.
Oh my, what to do? Well, pray about it, of course. So, I turned to my dear prayer partners for help in finding the grace in this difficult passage. We read the Psalm out loud and then sat silently together in our prayer circle. What came out of our prayer time was nothing short of the work of the Holy Spirit.
For some of us, the Psalm was an awakening to our understanding of and compassion for relatives and friends who suffer with severe mental and emotional handicaps. One had planned a visit the next day to two sisters who had been a “thorn in her flesh” for 40 years. The Psalm was an opening to her acceptance of these difficult relatives just as they were, without the pull to fix them or push them away. Another was better able to understand the seemingly inconceivable agony of a family member who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. And, yet another found relief in knowing that it is okay to “rail against God” like the Psalmist, finally understanding that God wants us to speak to Him “out loud” about our pain and struggles and hopelessness.
Yes, this troublesome Psalm helped us understand all these things, and, for me, most especially the realization that I can and must trust in the true nature of God no matter the situation in which I find myself. The Psalmist laid his soul bare before God, expressing the full extent of his suffering, leaving nothing unspoken. By doing so, I believe that he was drawn into the place of complete presence with God and trust that God is with us in our suffering, even if our circumstances don’t change.
In her blog posting “Joy is Not the Opposite of Pain” (www.thinkingworship.com), Stacey Gleddiesmith notes that praise and lament are not opposites and neither are pain and joy. Rather, the antonym for pain is comfort. Yet, we are not called to a life of comfort. It is through our suffering that we are called to participate in the transformation and redemption that Jesus began and continues in this world. When we tell God about our suffering (even though he already knows), God can transform that suffering, not necessarily by taking it away, but by turning it into the “painful joy” of knowing that God is steadfast in his unconditional love of us. And, it is that love, which ultimately has overcome all of our struggles and all the suffering of the world.
— Zonnie Breckinridge
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