Ps 42-43
2 November 2008
All Saints’ Sunday
“On a Dark Night”
As you may or may not know, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor in November 1995. Following that was surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy. I’ve had numerous MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans since then to check for re-growth of tumor. I’m happy to say they always were clear; in fact, my doctor said he sees no reason to do any more of them.
About three weeks ago, I had an MRI as a check-up for the first time in two years. Something happened that I have never before experienced: I had a couple of moments of claustrophobia.
Beforehand, the technician’s assistant asked the usual questions, like, “Do you have any metal in your body?” I noticed a cartoon on the wall in which a woman is being rolled into the MRI tube. The doctor’s telling her that they need to scan her brain to figure out why she has claustrophobic episodes! I laughed about that with the assistant, saying, “Yes, let’s put you in this coffin and figure out why you have claustrophobia!”
But when they rolled me into that tube—I don’t know what it was—my brain started working. I thought about that idea of a coffin and being buried alive. I remembered the movie The Vanishing. (By the way, the original Dutch version is far superior to the American remake with Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland. The American film had a predictable happy ending.) That image of waking up, buried alive in a coffin, kept coming back to me! Then I thought about people in prison, crammed into tiny cells.
A couple of times I was on the verge of squeezing the little signaling device they give you. I didn’t want to disrupt the scanning process, but I was also ready to get out of that thing! Some deep breathing (and some prayer) enabled me to get through it.
As I left the building and got in my car, I realized that I’ve never understood how terrible it must be for those who have claustrophobia. (Or for that matter, people who have panic attacks and post-traumatic stress syndrome.) I’m usually a pretty calm guy. I guess I’m thankful for getting just a tiny taste of what so many people routinely experience. It goes a long way toward better understanding—not just hearing about the fear, but actually feeling it.
It’s given me a new appreciation for what our writer goes through in Psalms 42 and 43. (We’ve linked them together, since most scholars agree that they were originally a single psalm.)
This is a guy who feels like he’s been cut off from God. Some bad stuff has happened to our psalmist. In 42, verse 3, he wails, “My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’” I won’t pretend to make a psychological diagnosis; I won’t say that the psalmist is claustrophobic. But from what he says, he seems to feel literally overwhelmed; he feels like he’s been buried alive!
In his contribution to the Anchor Bible, Mitchell Dahood talks about this.[1] He speaks of several verses, including verse 7: “Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows have gone over me.” This is language symbolic of Sheol, the land of the dead.
There are many similarities between our psalm and the song of Jonah in chapter 2 of that book. He also cries “out of the belly of Sheol.” He also calls out to God, saying that “all your waves and your billows passed over me” (vv. 2, 3). Talk about being buried alive—here we go!
We need not push the image of entombment to recognize that this is someone who feels abandoned by God. And yet, all hope is not lost. There’s a fragment—a scrap he hangs onto—and it appears three times in this combined psalm: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God” (42:5, 11, 43:5).
More than one writer has seen something in this, as well as in other expressions of faith by the psalmist. What’s been seen is “a source of inspiration to one experiencing the ‘dark night of the soul.’”[2] The dark night of the soul. What is that? We sometimes hear it used in a number of ways today.
That phrase goes back to a poem written in the 16th century by St. John of the Cross. As he advanced deeper in his life of prayer, he began to experience periods of extreme loneliness and emptiness. The light and joy and peace he first received from God began to wither away. This was his “dark night.”
Last year, when some of Mother Teresa’s letters were made public, we saw how she also spoke of feeling abandoned by God. Her dark night of the soul was a dry wilderness of pain that lasted for many years.
The thing about these experiences “on a dark night” is that they aren’t signs of God’s displeasure: very far from it! Our psalmist, St. John of the Cross, Mother Teresa—and many other people—aren’t being punished by God, even though it may feel like it. I think we can agree that we’re not talking about slackers in the spiritual life! These unpleasant experiences are instead a sign of God’s love; they’re a sign of purification.
That runs contrary to the commonly-held idea that, if you’re a good Christian, you’ll have those feelings, as I just mentioned, of light and joy and peace. But faith and feelings are two very different things.
Rebecca Propst tells the story of a woman who sought counseling for depression.[3] Her church wasn’t very much help, because they assumed that Christians should always experience joy.
Propst says that they’re guilty of “spiritual gluttony,” which “focuses only on the joy and the promises of God that obedience will supposedly bring, and [it ignores] the high cost of obedience [which is also] ‘promised’ in Scripture.” She specifically cites our psalm as a case-in-point of faithfulness “in the dark,” so to speak.
Please hear me: I’m not saying that so-called “dark” feelings, in and of themselves, are good things. I am no masochist; I don’t enjoy pain or fear or suffering! But there are lessons we can learn only by attending their school. As Jesus says, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12:24).
Without death, there can be no resurrection. And that’s not simply a matter of coming back to life; it’s a matter of coming back to superabundant life.
(I preached the first part of the sermon; Banu preached the second part.)