Pit

Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 1-206 Sunday 25 Nov 2001

Reading: PSALM 88 – SONG FROM THE LOWEST PIT

(From ‘Encounter with God’ Bible Reading Notes)

‘0 God, early in the morning I cry to you. Help me to pray and to concentrate my thoughts on you. I cannot do this alone. In me there is darkness’ (Dietrich Bonhoffer, 1906-45).

TS Eliot once wrote (in The Sacred Wood), ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion … But of course only those who have … emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’ This anguished song expresses the darkest, minor chords of human experience. The faithful record gives words to countless people who find themselves in the dark pits of life of bereavement, unemployment, illness, inexplicable depression, injustice, exile, loneliness, misunderstanding, exhausted old age, violence, prison, homelessness, loss of direction. For some of us today, these will be words we need to pray.

There is no mandate in Scripture for a stiff upper lip in suffering.(See Jer 15:15-18; Mark 14:33,34,36; 15:34) God’s Word invites us to answer the God who spoke to us first of his saving activity in our lives (v 1). But at least in the circumstances of this particular psalm that’s all we can be sure of, and that he listens to us, sometimes (vs 2,5).

I wonder how many of us have talked to the Lord with the raw emotional truth of this psalm. Listen again: you’ve forgotten me, God; you are responsible for this pit experience; you’ve overpowered, not empowered, me; you’ve made sure I’m abandoned; you deliberately reject me; you bring terror – and it’s a long-term experience; ‘darkness is my closest friend’. In many of our churches, anyone praying like this would be written off as a spiritual failure.

There are times when the only authentic communication with God must be a ‘psalm of disorientation’. The expression to God of disorientation is itself an act of trust; it may help to bring re- orientation.

To what extent do the authenticity and depth of our praying match the realities of our daily lives?

– Pauline Hoggarth

Copyright Scripture Union, 2001

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