Hey everybody this is Sean, you're listening to More Fully Human, and I'm recording today on a topic that I really love.
And this one is loooong, so I cheated, and I made it a two-parter.
This is the first one, and the one that actually matters,
because with a title like, "Forsaken, hope in hopelessness" there's the chance that you came to this because you're there, right in the middle of the awful,
and you don't need a bunch of cool historical anecdotes, you don't need interesting theological or psychological perspectives
to help deepen an otherwise boring day,
you're feeling that hopelessness, so that's where we're going to jump in.
You see, there's a wonderful tool that's available to you for engaging with hopelessness
it's called a therapist, and no, I'm not joking, if you're really feeling hopeless,
therapists exist because so many of us deal with that same feeling, that same stuckness,
some of us for brief seasons, some of us due to a single event,
and some of us have to go in for "routine maintenance" on a regular basis.
Point is, we all need it at some point.
Please, don't cheat yourself out of the goodness of someone who knows how to help you handle what you're going through.
What I'm about to talk about is not a replacement for that, but an additional tool to keep in the toolbox of self-care.
And, it also happens to be topical, because right now in the Christian tradition it’s “Good Friday”
Now, that name seems a bit anachronistic for the day when the hero of your religion is brutally murdered at the hands of the empire, but Good, in this case, means holy, not pleasant.
And this day commemorates the day when of course, Jesus is executed by the Romans on a cross for being a subversive political figure and for challenging the authority figures in the region.
While he’s being executed he says, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
And that’s the tie-in here, because the tool that I want to introduce you to is
Emotional engagement through the Psalms, and that quote is actually the beginning of a Psalm.
Now, if you come from the Jewish tradition then when you hear, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" you recognize this right away.
This is Psalm 22 and it's part of your emotional heritage.
You may have even used this Psalm recently:
You may have been sitting Sheva with those who have lost a loved one.
You may have been going through a time of hopelessness or angst of some sort,
You may have been betrayed by your community or you may be surrounded by people
Who are antagonizing you or even by enemies who are threatening you.
And in order to deal with any of those circumstances, you went back to the Tehillim, to the Psalms.
For those in the Jewish tradition, and those adopted in, like me, the Tehillim are our emotional education.
These words and songs are a way for us to connect
The emotions and experiences that we have
To a longstanding tradition of approaching God with our emotions.
I just love this about the Jewish tradition
These songs are not the only songs that existed
But these were the ones that were preserved, that were special in some way.
Essentially, at some point these songs were compiled into the book.
When that happens, it's a statement by the editors that these psalms are significant.
This one's good
This one helps us understand what it means to be the people of God.
This song helps us connect emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically to God.
Or to what it means to be human.
Or helps us process something that would otherwise be unbearable.
From the divine perspective the Psalms are God's attempt
To get his people emotionally and psychologically involved in a process
Where they engage with what is going on in their life and particularly, they engage their emotions.
And the patterns in the Psalms help them to do this in a way
that makes them whole, honest, vulnerable, and that makes room for healing and for transformation.
Now, it's not pretty sometimes,
because in this process nothing is off-limits
I mean the songs are full of all kinds of
terrible, even evil, emotions and feelings.
For example, in some psalms there are calls to kill our enemies children and all kinds of violent, vengeful ideations.
But the psalms are not an endorsement claiming that this content is appropriate behavior, or even appropriate thoughts,
Instead, it's an invitation to present your raw, unfiltered, thoughts and feelings before God.
And any psychotherapist worth their salt knows what this can do... honest talk about our feelings changes our feelings.
We actually witness this in most of the Psalms as well: the desire changes over the course of the Psalm.
So you might start out in a place of hopelessness, or vengeance, or anger
And move to a place of peace, or hope, or begin to trust again as you engage in the process of healing.
It's a phenomenal practice - not just the seeing a therapist, but also the engaging with the psalms - and I highly encourage
Anybody who's listening to this to
Take that as something something
To carry into your day.
It's as simple as finding a Psalm that you like, maybe one that seems to fit how you're feeling,
And read it aloud (ideally in private) and let it give words to the feelings and emotions that you're having
Even if you're not sure what you think of God right now, even if it's "bad theology" (and some of them are, by design)
I guarantee you that it's going to be helpful to get those emotions out into words.
And that brings us back to Psalm 22 which is one of the greatest hits written by the most famous
of the Psalmists
It's a song of David.
And David is in case you're unaware a prophet a priest and a king
which is the trifecta of ancient Jewish leadership
One of the things that's interesting about David's Psalms is that, because of his varied roles, there's so many different ways to interpret his Psalms.
The psalm could be one of the songs that he wrote when he was trying to process his own life
because a lot of the Psalms of David are actually
copied out of David's journal and then added to the Tehillim later
so thatwe can use them to identify as a fellow human in process.
I can take the words and relate, dude to ancient dude, just attempting to make sense of life.
But there's also that prophetic aspect, which basically means that David was
recognized to have a very close relationship with God, the kind of relationship where God told him things.
They could be things that were going to happen in the future, mysteries about what God is like, warnings about what not to do, divine impartations of wisdom, et cetera.
So one of the other ways to interpret the Psalms of David
is to try and guess what God is revealing to David and what
God may be showing David about something that's going to happen.
And then also as a king, sometimes David is trying to give his people words
that help them understand who they are as a collective
and to give them a shared identity
All that to say that this psalm can be read as a unifying identity for the people of God,
it can be read as a personal record of David's own experiences,
it can be read as an emotional journey that David feels is important for the people,
and it can also be read as a mystic encounter with a God who reveals secrets.
Personally, I think we should choose "all of the above"
because do you really want to miss out on any of the good stuff by narrowing your perspective?
I think it's important to keep our options open especially when we regard the theme of Psalm 22: hope in hopelessness
As you can probably tell from that first line,
My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
Psalm 22 is a song for those who are in deep despair
And especially those facing Injustice
As as you will see as we read it there's just so much in this song
about a good or even a righteous person who is
being made to experience deep deep suffering and to be antagonized by
Those who do not love them and who are not good, not righteous.
It's what happens when the bad guys beat the good guys
But it's not all bad news, there's also hope in it
And that's what we're going through all of this to get to.
So, here it is,
Psalm 22
It begins with some musical notation
For the choir director
According to the doe of the morning (which is probably a reference for the melody)
A Psalm of David
And now it begins
My God my God why have you forsaken me
Far from my Deliverance are the words of my groaning
Oh my God I Cry by day but you do not answer
and by night but there is no silence for me
Yet
You Are Holy
You who inhabits the Praises of Israel
In you our father's trusted they trusted and you rescued them
To you they cried out and they fled to safety
In you they trusted and they were not disappointed
But I am a worm and not a human.
I am a disgrace of mankind and despised by the people
All who see me mock me
They sneer, they shake their head saying,
Commit yourself to the Lord, let the Lord save you;
Let the Lord rescue you because he Delights in you.
So, pause, if you're tracking, our hero is disgraced
and the people are mocking him and taunting him.
They're saying, if God really loves you, why won't God rescue you?
This point is so low that our protagonist feels they've lost their humanity.
But here's where the song goes next,
into memories of vulnerability that had a pleasant outcome and then a petition.
Yet You, Lord are the One who brought me forth from the womb
You taught me trust when upon my mother's breasts
Upon you I was cast from birth and you have been my God from my mother's womb.
And here's the petition:
Be not far from me for trouble is near and there is none to help.
Such a simple plea, just don't leave me alone.
And the song continues to describe the trouble.
Many bulls have surrounded me strong Bulls of Bashan have encircled me
They open wide their mouth at me as a ravening and a roaring lion
I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint
My heart is like Wax it is melted Within Me
My strength is dried up like a potsherd and my tongue Cleaves to my jaws
And you lay me in the dust of death.
Dogs have surrounded me.
A band of evildoers encompasses me
They have pierced my hands and my feet
I can count all my bones.
They look they stare at me.
They divided my garments among them and for my clothing they cast lots.
So, at this point, our protagonist is completely surrounded by enemies
and they have literally pinned him so that he can't escape.
He's exhausted, broken, and humiliated, and they're gambling over his clothes.
What does our forsaken hero do next?
He calls for help.
But You O Lord be not far off
You who are my help, hasten to my assistance
Deliver my soul from The Sword my only life from the power of the dog
Save me from the lion's mouth.
From the horns of the wild oxen, answer me.
Now, we don't hear what the answer is, but something happens, because there's an abrupt turn in the psalm.
The protagonist goes from this pleading, to suddenly and boldly commanding praise.
I will tell of your name to my people
In the midst of the assembly, I will praise you, LORD
You who honor the Lord, Praise Him
Are you descendants of Jacob, glorify him
and stand in awe of him all you descendants of Israel
And our forsaken and afflicted protagonist gives reason for why this praise should happen
For the LORD has not despised nor scorned the suffering of the afflicted;
Nor has the LORD hidden his face from the afflicted one.
But when he cried to the LORD for help,
the LORD heard.
It seems that the pleading for God to be near was answered,
because our hero says that the LORD has heard and has not abandoned him
and because of this, there is a renewed commitment to his vows and
a confidence that God will make things right.
Check it out:
From You, LORD, comes my praise in the great assembly
I shall pay my vows before those who fear You.
The afflicted will eat and be satisfied
Those who seek Him will praise the Lord
May your heart live forever
And then he just goes off, because apparently this isn't just for him,
but the answer from God is apparently enough to declare
that every single person will be restored by this answer.
All the ends of the Earth will remember and turn to the Lord
And all the families of the Nations will worship before You
For the kingdom is the Lord's and he rules over the nations
All the prosperous of the earth will eat and worship
And those who go down to the dust will bow before him
Even he who did not keep his soul alive
Posterity will serve him and it will be told of
The Lord to the coming generation
They will come and will declare his righteousness to a people who will be born
that He has accomplished it.
Wow, lets let that sit a moment, ultimate despair turns into a hope for all humanity
over the course of 31 lines.
I cobbled that together from a couple of different translations, including my own,
just to help it flow, but in case it was still difficult to follow,
It begins with a character called "the afflicted"
Who has been abused and mistreated and surrounded by their enemies
And there's so much pain, and anguish, and fear
that the afflicted feels completely betrayed and abandoned
and he cries out, Why did you leave me alone
This is when I need you most and you're not here.
Then there's the comparison, because
Other people trusted in you and you delivered them
Come one, I've seen you come through for other people
But here I am, so ruined that I'm not even a person anymore
I've been destroyed so thoroughly and everybody hates me
They're mocking me for trusting you
They're saying that if you loved me, I wouldn't be here.
And then there's a memory of complete vulnerability:
I've trusted you from my mother's womb
You have been my God since before I can remember.
But now there's trouble and no one to help
And not only is the afflicted feeling this emotional trauma, but a very physical one as well.
There are these terrible pictures of a man who can see his own bones
Whose mouth is dry and stuck to the roof of his mouth
Enemies and wild beasts have him in their jaws and are stripping him apart.
And in the midst of this, the afflicted continues to cry out for help
And then, it shifts, he gets some sort of answer, and we don't know what it is, but the tone changes.
Instead of hopeless pleading, the afflicted begins to praise.
He says I'm going to tell
Of your name
To my family
I'm going to praise you
And then, and I love this so much, he's not content to praise alone
By the time we get to verse 23 he says you who fear the lord
Praise Him
You descendants of Jacob glorify him stand in awe of him
You descendants of Israel
Something has happened
In the space of two verses
Because
He's been
So afraid and asking for this this salvation and rescue
But then all of a sudden in verse 24 he says
that God has not ignored his affliction and God has not hidden his face from him.
But when he cried to him For help he heard.
So, the answer isn't a rescue, but a restoration.
God is not going to keep the afflicted one from suffering, rather,
because of the suffering, and because God was with him in it,
the afflicted is going to be central to the restoration of humanity.
And then we have all these verses about that restoration, about the prosperous and the poor and even
those abandoned to death all gathering together in the restoration of the world.
It's wild! I really can't think of another work that has more emotional range.
Now the method of this transformation, the "answer" that the afflicted received, is not made clear
And I like to think that that's intentional because the utility of this Psalm at it's most basic level
is how we go from deep depression to Glorious Ascension
And, according to the psalm, we don't do that by glossing over the terror and the blood and the tears of the in-between
We don't have a simple answer we can repeat so you can skip through, but we go through that journey by expressing it
By saying this is where I am and I can't handle it and this is what I need and I don't know if it's there
And we don't stop there, we keep crying out, we get vulnerable and we keep engaging with our poor, broken trust muscles
And if you've been here before, then you feel how exhausting this is,
You feel this when you go through these places in your life where
You realize that you don't have what you need to accomplish what you need done
And so this song even if you're not sure how it works is it essentially crying out for help even when you feel ignored.
It's continuing to cry out for help from a source you don't understand and you're not sure about.
But you know that you can't do this on your own so you crying out for help and you're trusting that
In that cry
In that opening of yourself to what might be out there to save you
That that cry opens the door for hope it opens a door for the possibility of that
Glorious Ascension and that return to gratitude and joy.
If you want to stop there, I hope that helps you and I hope that gives you a reminder that you're not alone, even when
and honestly, especially, if you feel completely lost and abandoned and hopeless.
This psalm acknowledges that those feelings are not just permitted, but encouraged to be expressed and to be engaged with.
This psalm honors the process of working through total abandonment, betrayal, loss, and even death.
It also offers hope that whenever your mysterious "answer" comes, that you too will feel your suffering was worth it
and that you will see your part to play in the remaking of the world.
That’s the point, right there, and that’s the most useful way to engage with this Psalm, in my opinion, but if you want to stick around for some historical context, some deeper meanings, and some insights that help fix some major errors in certain church doctrines, go ahead and check out part 2.