Friday, August 29, 2014

Friday, August 29, 2014

Psalm 102

I am writing this the day after the death of Robin Williams. The media is full of the story of his deep depression leading to an alleged suicide. As I read the verses of Psalm 102, I can see poetic descriptions of human depression. Depression is a nasty mental illness. It causes the afflicted to believe there is no exit, no remedy, no way out of suffering and loneliness, except death. We have all experienced depression to some degree, so these verses echo personally in our hearts. At the same time, these verses also reflect the thoughts some seniors have in their quiet end-of-life moments. 

v4 My heart is blighted and withered like grass; I forget to eat my food.
v5 In my distress I groan aloud and am reduced to skin and bones.
 v9 For I eat ashes as my food and mingle my drink with tears
v11 My days are like the evening shadow; I wither away like grass.

The singer believes his days are at an end. Perhaps his arthritic pain is too great. v3 For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers. He believes that God, in his anger has abandoned him “you have taken me up and thrown me aside”. This causes his enemies to mock him all day, using his own name as a curse. This attitude sounds like the paranoia that accompanies depression. Shakespeare gives Hamlet such a line “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world!” (1:2:133-4). This talk is all too familiar! This is the dark place few talk about, but all of us recognize.

Yet this Psalm opens with a humble plea:  

1 Hear my prayer, Lord; let my cry for help come to you.

2 Do not hide your face from me when I am in distress.

In the face of death, a death the singer believes will come upon him soon, he still begs God to listen. In his pain he urges God to “answer me quickly”. But the singer does not continue a litany of his complaints. This is not a Woe is Me Blues song from long ago. 

In a brilliant stroke of poetic reversal, he turns the song into a great statement of the endurance and eternal power and glory of God. The singer imagines a time after he is gone, when God will raise up Zion, rebuilding her to her former glory, not for Zion’s sake, but to bring all nations into the fear of the Lord. And in classic Hebrew poetic style the images are echoed in two varied statements, as in v15: 

“The nations will fear the name of the Lord, all the kings of the earth will revere your glory”.

The singer describes the future, when a generation not yet born will praise the Lord. He describes release of the prisoners and relief of the destitute such as himself. He finishes the Psalm with a series of contrasts. God has cut him off in the middle of his days, but God’s days go on forever. The people of the earth will perish and wear out like a garment, but the earth God created will stand. God never changes. The singer finishes with a line of great praise for God:

v28 The children of your servants will live in your presence;

Their descendants will be established before you.”

It begs the question that a singer so deep into despair over his own pain, mortality and death would sing a song of such unfailing faith and vision, looking to the Eternal God to go on forever. His thoughts remind me of a song from the early 60’s, “Get Together”, originally composed by Chet Powers and made famous by The Youngbloods. Again, the singer accepts his mortality: 

We are but a moment’s sunlight / Fading in the grass

The contrast in images in Psalm 102 is powerful and compelling. No doubt these images lead us to reflect on our own fragile mortality, our own few fleeting years on this earth, and our own prayer that the God we trust will love and embrace those who come after us. 

Peter Mansell August 12, 2014