November 7thPsalm 88
Darkness is my Closest Friend
The Psalter is full of psalms of lament, as any reader of this blog knows. Most laments follow a pattern: a description of suffering, a testimony to commitment to God, an expectation that God will deliver, and finally a word of praise. This psalm breaks the pattern. The prayer is bitterly and brutally honest. Let’s note several key things about this psalm:
- The psalm begins with a short prayer: ‘YHWH is the God who delivers.’ It goes on to urge YHWH to ‘listen to my cry.’
- But the rest of the psalm is occupied with the suffering of the psalmist and a series of pained protests to God who seems silent. God, in other words, is both the problem and the solution.
- The psalm reminds us that the season of plea must be taken as seriously as the season of
- “Psalms of disorientation are important because they insist the world must be experienced as it really is, and not in some idealistic way. These are not prayers of unbelief and failure but acts of bold faith! All experiences of disorder are a proper subject for conversation with ” [Walter Brueggemann]
- God has not responded, thus the psalmist remains ‘afflicted’ and the prayer ends with complaint and the pitiful statement, ‘darkness is my closest friend.’
- The last word of the poem is darkness. But, the first word is LORD!
Elie Wiesel grew up in Hungary in the 1930s in a buoyant, secure Jewish family. He loved study, scripture, and singing. But this all ended when Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944. In less than two months, nearly 440,000 Jews were deported from Hungary in more than 145 trains. Most were deported to Auschwitz. Upon arrival, the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele separated out people: men and boys to the left, women, children, the elderly and infirm to the left – to the ovens. Eli, just thirteen, never saw his mother Sarah or his seven-year old sister (Tziporah) again. His father later died also in the camp.
In his searing memoir, Night, he writes this:
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things…. Never.
I first read that book as a young college student and it had a powerful impact on my own reflections on faith and the character of God. But…some ten years after reading Night, I came across another book by Wiesel – Souls on Fire. This book revisits some of the great OT stories of Abraham, Moses, and Job. At one point Wiesel indicates that nothing is more worthwhile than searching the Scriptures, asking questions of the text, seeking the truth of God’s word.
The book reveals a man still struggling with faith. Wiesel’s life is a clear witness to the truth that one can go through the worst, have every shred of faith pulled away leaving one shivering, bare, and alone – where all the evidence seems to point to God as dead, and yet can still become a person of faith, alive to the living God.
OT theologian, Walter Brueggemann, reminds us that ‘Psalm 88 shows us what the cross is about: faithfulness in scenes of complete abandonment.’ Facing death, Jesus was shunned by his closest friends, his heart was full of troubles, even his Father seems to have abandoned him on the cross. But even there he still cried out, ‘My God, my God.’ The cross shows us the depth of God’s love and shows us that nothing we experience is unknown to God’s Son who suffered the ultimate price for such love.