Lent Day 14: Longing for God

 O God, you are my God; I seek you;
    my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
    as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
~Psalm 63:1

Image courtesy of Todd Bolen

Here's the God's honest truth (which, I hope I am sharing on a regular basis, and not only when I make an announcement about it): I didn't post yesterday for a number of reasons. In no particular order: I had an unexpectedly extra busy day; I was experiencing a lot of physical fatigue (new work-out-swimming routine, which, along with Daylight Savings Time, is kicking my butt); and--probably the biggest reason: I couldn't connect with any of the lectionary passages for yesterday. Well, not until late enough that I knew my brain would be useless if I tried to write something coherent. 

And then, today, voila, God and the daily lectionary present me with my favorite psalm, one that I have mostly memorized because I pray it so often. Actually, I sing it. I sing it when I am using my PCUSA Daily Prayer Book for morning prayers, and I sing ig in my head when I am lying in bed at night, especially when I am struggling with sleep. 

The psalm has a title: A psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness in Judah. 

I love the stories of David, a flawed human who nevertheless captures our imaginations at every turn. I know a bit about David, but I had to Google "when was David in the wilderness of Judah"? And the answer was: He was in the wilderness of Judah twice; once when he was fleeing from King Saul, and once when he was fleeing from his son, Absalom. 

Reading that was a like a punch in the gut. 

Scholars believe the more likely context was the latter. David was fleeing his son.

David was fleeing Absalom because... the sins of the father are visited on the children, as scripture reminds us. In other words, the family system was broken, and it went all the way back to David's taking and raping the married woman Bathsheba, followed by David's arranging for Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, to be killed, in order to cover up her pregnancy by David. The prophet Nathan told David God's response to all this: "Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, for you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife."  Or, as Eugene Peterson elaborated on it in The Message,

"And now, because you treated God with such contempt and took Uriah the Hittite’s wife as your wife, killing and murder will continually plague your family." ~2 Samuel 22:10

The enmity between David and Absolom emerged because David never punished his other son, Amnon, who had raped his half-sister, Tamar. Absolom was avenging his sister and trying to take the throne from his father, who he deemed unworthy of it.

Knowing the background of this psalm--that it wasn't simply written in the context of one of his many wars or battles, but most likely in the context of his flight from his own son, which he had brought about by many actions and inactions over many years--has shaken me. But also it makes me love the psalm even more.

David is in more than one kind of wilderness. He is in the wilderness of Judah which, truly, is an inhospitable environment for life. But he is also in the wilderness of his soul. He is using his physical hunger and thirst to connect to that deeper and more devastating wilderness, where he isn't sure God is still listening. He is longing for the old, familiar connection, in which God and he were on easy terms, David freely speaking and singing his praise and devotion to God, and God, in turn, continually inspiring him to more and more beautiful songs of praise.

For me, this psalm is a psalm of deep comfort. I call out and I trust that God hears. I understand that this may not be everyone's experience, and I remember times when it might not have been mine. But today, I am grateful for the beauty of this psalm, and for the reminder that God is listening. And today, I grieve once again the texts of terror* that are about both Bathsheba and Tamar, and remember: one of the things that makes scripture so important, and so holy, is its willingness to tell us the truth, even about our heroes. 

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

* Coined by scripture Scholar, Phyllis Trible, author of Texts of Terror: Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives.