The Psalm That Ends in the Dark

The illness took the colors out first. That is how she describes it when she describes it at all, which is rarely, because people want it to be sadness and it is not sadness, it is a flattening.

Food tastes of the idea of food. Music she used to love arrives as a sequence of correct sounds. Her sister's voice on the phone is her sister's voice, and she loves her sister, and the loving is a fact she holds rather than a thing she feels.

And this went too.

She promised God, in a better season, at thirty one, sitting on a wall outside a hospital where somebody else was ill, that she would keep praying whatever happened. She had meant it about circumstances. It had not occurred to her that the thing that could happen was to the apparatus itself.

She stopped about two years ago.

Not out of rebellion, and not out of doubt, which is the part that people get wrong when she has tried to explain it. She stopped because of a scruple. Prayer, as she understands it, is a person turning toward God. And what she has been doing is producing sentences in a room with nothing behind them, and that, in her judgment, is not prayer, it is talking. She will not call a thing by a name it does not deserve.

So there has been silence, and the silence has been going on long enough now to have its own shape.

You may have stopped for that reason. Not because you decided against God, but because you have too much respect for the word prayer to apply it to what you are actually able to do.

The one psalm that does not turn

Now I want to show you something about the book of Psalms that a lot of people who have read it their whole lives have never noticed, and it is going to matter to you specifically.

The psalms of complaint, of which there are many, nearly all turn. There is a pattern: the complaint, sometimes very bitter and very long, and then a hinge, and then a lift. But I will trust. But thou hast been my help. Yet will I praise Him. It is so consistent that scholars name it.

Psalm 88 does not turn.

It begins in trouble and it goes down, and it keeps going down, and it never once lifts, and the last word of the psalm in the Hebrew is darkness.

O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: let my prayer come before thee; incline thine ear unto my cry.Psalm 88:1-2

You are praying something that is already in the book, and it was kept precisely as it was prayed. Psalm 88 goes down for eighteen verses and ends on the word darkness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been carrying two years of sentences you refused to name.

And the last line

Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.

That is the ending. There is no hinge. Nothing arrives. The man who wrote it did not get to the lift, and it is entirely possible he never did.

And God kept it.

Sit with that, because it is the whole argument. It was not edited. Nobody appended a comforting verse. It was gathered up with the others and put into the hymnbook of the people of God, and it has been read and sung and prayed for three thousand years exactly as it stands, with darkness as the last word.

You are praying something that is in the book, and it was kept precisely as it was prayed. Psalm 88 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of the middle of the Psalter and lays it on a woman who has been silent for two years out of respect.

Now let me speak to your scruple, because it is the most honorable thing in this article and I am not going to knock it over.

You will not call a thing by a name it does not deserve. Good. Hold on to that.

But look at your definition. You said prayer is a person turning toward God, and then you added, without noticing, and feeling something while they do it. The second half is yours. It is not in the definition anywhere in Scripture, and Psalm 88 is the proof: a man turns toward God for eighteen verses, feels nothing but darkness, and the result is filed under prayer by God Himself.

You have been meeting the actual definition all along and disqualifying yourself on a clause you added. That is exactly what the survival of Psalm 88 demonstrates, and the Spirit of God has been the one carrying two years of sentences you refused to name.

What the flatness is not

Let me be careful, because this category holds a rule and the rule is for your protection.

I am not going to tell you the colors come back. I do not know that. I am not going to tell you that if you pray flat for long enough it lifts, because Psalm 88 is precisely the evidence that sometimes it does not, and if I said otherwise I would be handing you a schedule and a fresh disappointment.

What I will say is what the flatness is not. It is not distance from God. It is not disqualification. And it is not a report on whether you are heard, because a person cannot detect being heard from the inside, and never could, at any temperature.

You are heard at the temperature of nothing, and being heard was never something you could feel. The word puts it plainly, and that is the plain sense of a psalm that ends in darkness being kept in the hymnbook, and His Spirit is the one holding the whole of it.