PSALM 88

If you, like me, are very unsettled in the chaos that the Supreme Court and Republican legislatures and Republican leadership are creating, I think you might find Psalm 88 very helpful. It is the one and only Psalm out of 150 that has no good resolution. It doesn't end with praise for God nor does God respond to the Psalmist. The Psalmist just continues and continues and continues to pray to God, even trying to plead with God that dead people can’t praise him. Hint, hint.

I however find it very hopeful, because there’s also no indication whatsoever that the Psalmist has run out of hope, that there’s any reason to not hope because God is silent. And I also understand that Jewish people prayed this Psalm particularly during the holocaust. Because it seemed God was silent. And today, and for the past seven years, I have felt that God has been silent. It just seems like one disaster after another. So, coming upon it in the Revised Common Lectionary was providential this morning.

I have written before about how late I came to understand racism and systemic poverty and all the things that intersect to create the chaos we’re seeing today. Part of the reason for this blog is to admit my fault and to spread the word in any way I can. It’s my mea culpa. It’s also about spreading the knowledge any way I can about that, but also about how we can resist and how we can create hope and create power and love God and each other. In fact, all those things happen at the same time. I’ll probably be writing more next time about that, but for today, I want to leave you not just with Psalm 88 as a prayer resource but also with a Buddhist prayer practice that I’ve been doing since Trump became the Republican nominee for president in 2016.

And it goes like this: we begin by taking a few breaths to center ourselves, to come to a place of calm. This time can be long or short. Once centered, we pray for four things. Those four things are happiness, freedom from suffering, God’s joy, and peace, if you like you can think of it as the peace of Christ. And we pray for those four things for five people. Those five people are in order: ourselves, someone very dear to us, someone a little further away, someone who might annoy us, and finally we pray for someone who might be our enemy.

As an example, I would say may I enjoy happiness, may my spouse enjoy happiness, may a family member, say my sister, enjoy happiness, may someone at church who might annoy me enjoy happiness, and may … well I don’t know SCOTUS or Trump or Republican leadership, you pick … enjoy happiness. And then I would go on to pray for freedom from suffering for each of those five people, followed by praying for us never to be separated from God’s joy, followed by a prayer that we all might dwell in God‘s peace.

Now, it’s going to be hard if you try this. You might not mean it at first. I did not. In fact, it just made me angry for a long time. But I’m here to say that I have come to see these people who are clearly enemies to the American way of life, (they are clearly enemies to women and trans people and lesbian people, Black people, people of color, immigrants, disabled people, etc.) I’ve come to see them not as enemies … ok, I still see them as enemies … but more I’ve come to see how lost they are.

And I can relate to being lost. I don’t know if you can. But I have been as lost as they are. I have made decisions that hurt people, just like they’re doing, out of my confusion and anger and frustration and trying to get to a better place in life. And I can see how I was headed directly toward where these people are. And because of that, I don’t want to think of them as monsters or call them names or dehumanize them, because that would’ve hurt me deeply when I was in that space.

I think we’re all lost in our own ways, and that’s really the message I have today. Although we need to resist and we need to fight back and we need to do whatever we can wherever we are to stop this madness, I think we need to try to do it without losing sight of the fact that we are all people.

And that’s probably a hard thing to hear today.

If so, I recommend Psalm 88.

May it fill you with peace and God’s comfort today.