Let’s start with a trick question.
What is the most violent book of the Bible?
Here’s a counter intuitive proposal.
Psalms.[1]
OK, maybe second after Joshua. Ok, Revelation is pretty violent too
depending on how you read it.
But, the Psalms are definitely top five.
This is surprising, because, unlike those other
texts, we are accustomed to thinking of Psalms as the kinder, gentler face of
the Hebrew Scriptures. If Biblical
texts occupy a continuum between challenge and comfort, most of us would plot
Psalms all the way on the comfort side, as if it were the “Philippians” of the
OT.
You know, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not
want,” green pastures and still waters, refreshed souls and pretty words like
that. Wall hanging fodder. Crochet clichés.
But at least half of these poems - more if you read
carefully - reverberate with the terminology, objects, psychology, and other
accoutrements of violence. They are
songs of fear and danger and pursuit and pain.
Most of these tracks were written with a harp in one hand and a sword in
the other, birthed in the minds of frightened men, their bellies pressed
against a cold damp of a cave floor, their pursuers voices audible as swelled
ranks passed their obvious hiding place.
These are war songs.
And more often than not, they are the songs of those
on the business end of the swords.
So years ago, I hypothesized that Psalms would make
more sense in a war zone.[2]
Then I tested the hypothesis…and it obtained.
Last time I centered my devotional times on the
Psalter I was in Afghanistan (http://afghanistanford.blogspot.com/), shortly
after the US intervention. These ancient
songs read differently while I was grounded in a USAID compound, riding out a
no-roll command after an Embassy bombing.
They reached deeper into my psyche while wearing 30 lbs of bullet proof
camo, stuck in traffic, daily crossing Kabul’s clutter. They did new things in my heart the night an
explosion rattled the window next to my bunk, shattering the fog of jet lagged rest
with the confused dopamine cocktail, equal parts fight and flight.
But then, in accordance with my privilege, I came
home, soon and on my own terms, never more than a useful[3]
tourist to a place and people who have known only violence longer than I’ve
lived.
And after, I found it harder, not easier, to appropriate
these old words.
The Psalms seemed more foreign for having felt more
real.
I do not fear violence day-to-day and much of our
world does. So the Psalms often left me
feeling guilty[4]
rather than comforted, a stark reminder of my privilege rather than consolation
in my trivial troubles. This reality
left me with the question:
Is there an honest and productive way to pray Psalms
from privilege?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is Yes.[5]
In his popular[6]
commentary, John Goldingay[7]
suggests that these war zone Psalms can serve practical purposes in the piety
of privilege:
“If readers of the Psalm in (non-violent) parts of the world do not need
to pray for themselves in the manner of (war zone Psalms), then such a psalm
becomes the way we identify with our brothers and sister who have the
experience the psalm describes. We pray
it on their behalf…”
This has been particularly helpful in the last
couple months, while the world erupted with new war zones, fresh innocents
facing violence, more children gripped with fear, my Facebook cluttered with
stories so disturbing I want to believe they are products of sensationalism,
but I don’t.
Reports of atrocities in Gaza, beheadings in Iraq,
even Ebola in Africa - which may not be a direct act of human-on-human
violence, but it is a sort of human violence as the deaths pile up that could
be avoided if we were more generous – suddenly give shape to the words in those
middle pages of my Bible.
Now as I pray each Psalm twice.
I do a preliminary pass, allowing my intercessory
thought to move between my little problems at work, the decisions my friends
are making, the struggling marriages and businesses and churches in my
immediate world, and, mostly, the physical, spiritual, and psychological peril
my children will face in the years to come, despite their 95th
percentile privilege.[8]
But then I pray the Psalm a second time.
I pray it for people I have never met in Iraq, West
Africa, and Gaza.
Suddenly these texts are visceral and real,
expressing the helplessness I feel and giving words to rage building to hard
boil. They are artful words, but they
aren’t pretty words. They are words
crafted for situations just like these, which makes them more fitting than the
weak words I try to whisper. [9] They spit anger and hurt, sometimes
questioning God to his face, then, in the next breath acknowledging God’s unwavering
hessed[10]
and beg his intervention.
He saved (you) from (your) strong enemy,
from people who were against
(you)
because they were stronger than
(you). 18:17
May Yahweh answer you on the day of trouble,
the name of Jacob’s God shelter
you. 20:1
Yahweh in anger swallows up (your enemies);
fire consumes them.
When they have directed evil against you,
thought up a scheme, they do not
succeed. 21:9&11
My God, my God, why have you abandoned (them),
far away from delivering them,
from the word I yell?
But you, Yahweh, do not be far away –
my strength, come quickly as
(their) help.
Save (lives) from the sword,
(their) very self from the dog’s
power. 22:1&19-20[11]
Now, in my skeptical days[12],
I might be tempted to dismiss this as a “prayer placebo,” creating the illusion
of action, a convenient self subterfuge to deceive my conscience, illicitly convincing
it to quit it’s infernal nagging. But my
response to skeptical Stanford (and others who would echo that objection) might
be something like:
“Clearly you don’t have a lot of experience with
prayer.”[13]
There is nothing more motivating to sacrificial
action that speaking words of intersession.
Nothing builds solidarity more than begging God to act on another’s
behalf. Nothing breaks down the us-them
divide more than coming before God, identifying ‘them’ as ‘us’.
I find that God’s most common response to
intersession is deployment. So, yes,
that second pass, praying the psalm for sufferers, has sent me to the web sites
of reputable organizations, looking for ways I might responsibly bring
resources to bear on behalf of those gripped by fear in Gaza, Egypt, West
Africa, that I might render my prayers in cash.
Selah.
And that is how I’ve learned to Pray the Psalms from
Privilege.
“Yahweh, I call to you;
my rock, do not be deaf toward
me…[14]
Listen to the sound of my prayers for grace
when I cry for help to you
when I lift up my hands to your
holy room.
Do not drag (them) off with faithless people,
with people who do wickedness…
Yahweh is my strength and my shield;
in him my soul has trusted, and I
will find help. Ps 28: 1, 3, 9
This post
was written while listening to Transcendental
Youth by The Mountain Goats
Image citations[15]
[1]
You guessed it. I’m teaching Psalms next
year. So the blog will get some Psalter
reflections that don’t make talks.
[2] If
you posit the Christian assertion that the Scriptures are God’s self disclosure
to people across generation, class, and situation, it follows that some parts
of it would be more pertinent to different expressions or situations of the
human experience. Modernity is an
eccentric experience of humanness and despite the demands of our Pietistic
heritage, I don’t expect all of these texts to inform the peculiar human
expression I experience with equal weight.
[3]
And, as with all self aware development work, this modifier was questionable.
[4] The
issue of the utility of privilege-guilt is a complicated one. I have found Holly Burkhalter’s thoughts on it as useful as you might expect
given here perspective (late life Christian conversion after years of service
in governmental organizations and NGOs fighting poverty and oppression).
[5]
One of the themes of my novel is that the surprising thing about Jesus is not
that he loved the culturally and economically oppressed. We are biologically (and those of us with metaphysics
that allow for it, spiritually) wired for pro-social emoting. What is REALLY remarkable is that he took
time to love the men of privilege that opposed him.
[6]
‘Popular’ as in, written accessibly for general conception, to distinguish it
from his technical, scholarly tomes…not ‘popular’ in the sense that millions
have read it like Twilight or Harry Potter.
[7]
Incidentally, after illustrating half of the “Old Testament for Everyone”
series with poignant and heart breaking (not to mention, credibility building)
illustrations of caring for his wife, rendered unresponsive for a decade by
illness, and eventually, her death, it’s a joy to read illustrations of a
septuagenarian newlywed.
[8]
Sorry to reveal the weakness of my feminism here. But a white, blonde, girl raised in a college
town, with every financial advantage, in a secure, two parent family, with an
attentive father and a remarkable full-time-mother, who attends one of the
nation’s finest school districts, who will have access to a no-debt college
education, doesn’t get to claim victim status of some pernicious
patriarchy. My daughters will struggle with gender inequalities,
but in the accounting of global privilege, they owe way more than they are
owed. They will need to expend much more energy considering how to use
their privilege well than how to fight the privilege set against them. Of course, all of this is even more true of
my son.
[9]
This is also helpful because the words I slap together on behalf of real sufferers
seem so thin and weak and hypocritical.
The opportunity to talk God’s speech back to him from situations like
those I pray for makes praying for these situations possible. It is like hotwiring a car, plugging prayers
under oppression into situations of oppression, removing my hypocrisy and
privilege laced language from the equation.
Outsourcing the script to victims of violence gives the words of my
intersession unearned *
*I’ve said this before, but the evangelical insistence
on ‘originality’ and ‘spontaneity’ in prayer, has lead to one of the most
unoriginal and dully repetitive prayer traditions in Christian history. If I am not responsible with crafting clever
words, but borrow them, my mind and heart are freed to invest the words with my
will. If your prayer life is dull, it
might be time to pick up a prayer book, maybe even the one in the middle of
your Bible.
[10]
Love and kindness and faithfulness.
[11]
Psalm 22 is one of the finest prayers of the sufferer. Goldingay argues that “It resolutely insists on
facing two sets of facts. It invites
people to look directly in the face of adversity that has happened to them but
also to stay attentive to the facts about God they already knew.” This mixture of holding the reality of
a violent world and the love and kindness of God (hessed) is probably why this works so well as foreshadowing the
work of Jesus…not as a kind of magical crystal ball foretelling events, but as
a theological statement of who he will be, the cosmic non- sequitur, the
metaphysical paradox who reconciles our stark hatred of our world’s atrocities
and our cosmic intuition that justice reigns.
[12]
Which were almost 20 years ago now…but really, were also yesterday.
[13]
Not that I do. Prayer is the Christian
discipline I am worst at. But maybe just
enough to know how it works.
[14] I
am writing a talk on these passages that articulate the common experience of
finding God remote or hidden. I wrote a
line today about this verse which may or may not make the talk, but I like
it. “’Are you deaf…’ seems passive
aggressive…like something you would yell at a ref who just made a call for the
other team, not a sanctioned line from the great prayer book of four millennia
of Yahwehists. Turns out God’s a big boy
and is not afraid of our wonderings, our doubts. But while the Palmists are fearless in their
doubts, they also doubt productively, hopefully, looking for him to answer
their doubt, and generally, are not disappointed.”
[15]
Lead Image: Benn illustration of Psalm 120:7 from a
scanned collection at 50Watts: http://50watts.com/#Light-in-the-Darkness-Benn-s-Psalms
Goldingay
image from: http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/person/john-goldingay
