Daily Lesson for August 5, 2016

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Psalm 88 verses 13 through 18:

13  But I, O Lord, cry to you;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
14  O Lord, why do you cast my soul away?
Why do you hide your face from me?
15  Afflicted and close to death from my youth up,
I suffer your terrors; I am helpless.
16  Your wrath has swept over me;
your dreadful assaults destroy me.
17  They surround me like a flood all day long;
they close in on me together.
18  You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me;
my companions have become darkness.

In his book "A Cry of Absence" Martin Marty writes of the terminal cancer diagnosis of his wife Elsa in 1981 the days leading up to her death late that her.  In a very touching scene in the memoir Martin tells how each night they would lie together in bed and read the psalms, he reading the even and she the odd. One night, when it came his time to read Psalm 88, he passed over it. "What happened to Psalm 88?" Elsa asked.  "I didn't think you could take Psalm 88.  It's a bleak psalm."  Elsa then said very lovingly to her husband, "Who do you think you are to decide what I can take?  The light ones don't mean anything if you haven't walked through the dark ones."

Psalm 88 is, in Martin Marty's words, "a wintry landscape of unrelieved bleakness."  It does not end all neat and pretty, with a bow on top. It does not end in the light of hope. It ends in darkness. It ends in verse 18, with darkness as the psalmist's only companion.

We might wonder, why is this psalm there in the Bible?  What place does so bleak a word have in the canon?  It is there because sometimes some of us are there, because at sometime we'll all be there -- with a diagnosis that is terminal, with a loved one who is dying, in a bleak and wintry place from which there is simply no escape.

It's times like these that darkness is our only companion. Reading Psalm 88 teaches us to befriend the darkness and not to fear it, to accept it as part of the journey -- an unavoidable part.

Sometimes in pastoral counseling, when someone is deeply sad or depressed or hopeless, I will read to them Psalm 88, with its pain and loss and at end sense of abandonment.  "Now why," I ask, "would the Biblical writers include this in the Bible?  Why would they allow this to remain without any sense of resolution?"  The person across from me usually shakes his or her head in an expression of not knowing or understanding. A long silence follows. And then I lean in, "Because, I think, the Bible knows that a person like you needs this word, this voice, this word of irresolution. Because this voice belongs."

Who am I to say anybody can't take reading Psalm 88? This dark psalm belongs. The darkness belongs.  The darkness belongs because people in the darkness belong, and because God's companionship can be found even in the darkness.