Psalm 88—Panicseed Sprouted Everywhere

"With one hand I could touch the grave and silently topple nameless into the pit."

Note From Andy

I asked you what Psalms I should do next and you chose Psalm 88. So here you go. It really puts the “dark” in “darkling.” If this Psalm describes your experiences, I hope my rendition can give articulation to your prayers.

Next up: Your second choice, Psalm 46.

Also, I haven’t recorded the audio for the podcast of Psalm 88 yet because I wanted to get this out before the end of the year, but that will be next up in the queue.

Translation of Psalm 88

Lord, you hold my salvation.
Day and night I cry out. Do you see?
May these cries pass for prayer
As they rise to you.
My life is full with misery.
With one hand I could touch the grave
And silently topple nameless into the pit.
I have only the strength to slip
Into the sea with the other dead.
They would accept me into the fraternity
Of those whom you forgot,
Whom you cut off and cast aside.
You pulled me into the dark in secret.
You tumble me along the seafloor.
I sway and stagger under the billows.
Above my head is everything lost
To the water. I crush. 

I am separated from all who knew me,
Who held me in their minds
And kept me in their affections.
You set a horror on me and they fled.
I am engulfed, shut in. I cannot go out.
I swing my hands in sorrow and shout.
Why this darkness?
I thought I would see wonders. 
I thought I held unearned love.
I thought in death I would rise up and praise you.
I thought in ruin I would meet your faithfulness
And see your marvels in the dark.
This is oblivion.

Yet, here I am. 
In the morning my affliction abides
And I raise my prayer to you.
Do not cast my hope away.
Do not hide yourself.
I have always been low, afflicted,
Lost from my youth.
I have suffered your terrors.
Few have helped me and none remained.
The waves of your fearful sea
Have tumbled me every time I stand. 
I spin in your dark waters
As they close in around me.

Only the darkness has not abandoned me.

Notes on the Psalm

Note #1: On darkness in the psalms

Most people who read the psalms for inspirational devotional nuggets will steer clear of Psalm 88. But, then, reality is not always sugar and rainbows and the Bible is nothing if not realistic.

This Psalm ends on a downbeat, to say the least. “Darkness has become my only companion” is pretty bleak. For me, this Psalm has always posed a question: am I able to let the downbeat be what it is or not? Ending without a note of hope tugs on something. It isn’t just the instinct that happiness is good and sadness is painful. It is the idea that God is good, thus there must be a happy ending. Right?

Yes and no. Many people do not have a happy ending and even those who do will have things in their lives that did not end happily or well. Even the lives of those who might seem outwardly triumphant and carefree will have inward wounds and shadows that don’t go away. A psalm like this one can speak for those shadows, can give them their time upon the stage of awareness, lest they be hidden and denied and repressed.

In a world under the shadow of the Fall, seeking only the uplifting aspects of life can be its own kind of unreality.

But there is still that instinct to put a happy note at the end of Psalm 88. If a preacher chose this psalm for their sermon, would it be appropriate to end it where the psalmist ends the psalm? Homiletical philosophy aside, I want to hold space for the ability (and sometimes necessity) for a truthteller to zoom in on one aspect of the truth at the expense of others in order to tell that aspect truly and fully. It is at times just as acceptable to talk about the darkness without the light as it is to talk about the light without the darkness. Just because you are a Christian doesn’t mean happy endings are the only thing you should celebrate. There should be no asterisk after Psalm 88 that explains away the despair and affliction to which it gives voice. (If you want more on that theme, listen to Encountering the Fall In Fiction by Lindsey Patton.)

“But,” you might say, “Surely God is still with them. Surely darkness is not their only companion.” I would nod to the theological reality of that hopeful thought, but insist that the psalmist still has permission to speak for his own felt reality and the felt reality of so many who have felt abandoned, alone, helpless, and hopeless. The truth is that despite the fact that God is good, that he does love his creations, that he does abide with sufferers, the despair in this psalm has shaped the prayers of the afflicted and given words to the experience of life in a broken world for millennia.

So let the psalm pose its questions. Sit with them. See what happens.

Note #2: What passes for prayer?

“May these cries pass for prayer
As they rise to you.”

What passes for prayer? What counts? When is it enough?

If we are honest, many of us find prayer difficult, mysterious, and vexing. Rather than being a balm to sufferers, guidance for the lost, and consolation for the ashamed and guilty, it can feel like a millstone around your neck. It can become just one more thing you fail to measure up to, just one more thing that you are relieved to set aside.

Prayer is the plague on the conscience of the tidy-minded religious person.

Paul’s advice to “pray continually” is a hard box to feel like you have ever fully checked off the religious to-do list. So it remains there, perpetually unchecked.

But the doorway to true prayer isn’t to keep checking the box, but to embrace that prayer is a thing for weak, distracted, burdened people. It is for people with perpetually unchecked spiritual boxes. 

Prayer can be short. It can be bad. It doesn’t have to be “put together.” It can be more of a “prayerful thought” raised in passing than a well-thought-out message to God—more of a text than a handwritten letter. Prayer can be urgent, frantic, lethargic, afraid, slapdash, slipshod, half-hearted, faint-hearted, or broken-hearted because humans are all of those things and prayer is very human. 

When you start to pray, you don’t even have to know what is going to come out of your mouth. You can watch your thoughts tumble up to God and trust him to sort them out. Isn’t this exactly what Paul said:

“The Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” (Romans 8:26, 27)

If prayer has become a burden, it might be because we have forgotten who God is.

God is the one who “searches hearts and minds.” (Psalm 139) He wants good things for us and can articulate our needs better than we can, even when they go too deep for words. He is the one who spoke first to us before we ever began to muster ourselves to respond to him. His articulation preceded ours and helps us in the process of finding what we have to say and saying it. 

We tend to try to bring our best to God in prayer, but if 2 Corinthians 12 is a true description of the spiritual life, that is nearly the opposite of the real goal of prayer. When Paul prayed three times that God would take away his “thorn” and was denied three times, God told him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” God’s words to Paul apply not only to Paul’s unique situation but to the entirety of the Christian life. We aren’t supposed to be strong. We aren’t supposed to have it all together or live a life that moves from triumph to triumph. We are supposed to be weak. Our need for the sufficiency of his grace and power are supposed to be on display.

When we begin to pray, let’s to admit to God how much of a scramble our lives are. Let’s laugh at ourselves, and to, again and again, accept His grace which covers, heals, and effaces our frantic self-salvation projects once again and forever. Why? Because his power works best in our weakness and, in his grace, we have already been given enough.

Note #3: Why did I add so much water imagery to this Psalm?

My rendition of the Psalm contains more direct water imagery than the original with lines like:

You tumble me along the sea floor.
I sway and stagger under the billows.

or

The waves of your fearful sea
Have tumbled me every time I stand. 
I spin in your dark waters
As they close in around me.

Part of this is designed to echo imagery elsewhere in the psalms. For instance, the beginning of Psalm 18 or Psalm 69 talk about similar experiences of danger and death, but use water imagery. 

Part of it reflects the fact that water is a theme in the Darkling Psalter.

And part of it echoes the reality that, to the ancient mind, the grave was a wet place. This is a thread that stretches all the way back to Genesis and runs forward to the vision of the New Creation at the end of Revelation (in which there is no sea). To a certain extent, they would have been imaging much of this psalm as watery simply because of its topic, not necessarily its language. So I decided to bring out those watery associations from the ancient imaginary more directly into the language of the psalm. 

Notes on the Poem

I didn’t plan for this to be a “New Year poem,” but it seemed to want to become one.

A lot has changed since Psalm 88 was first created, especially in the ways we experience, understand, and cope with our afflictions. Modern afflictions are understood biochemically and given words like anxiety and depression. We live in a disenchanted world and even Christians often function as materialists when it comes to our bodies and our inner selves. You can see a lot of that reflected in the poem.

A lot of the ideas in the poem that relate to the experience of trauma are coming from The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk. It is a gem of a book if you are at all interested in the way trauma presents itself and can be treated. You can see its influence especially in the stanza that starts, “The bells of that year rattled things awake.”

If you have been reading carefully, you will have noticed that there are some recurrent images in the Darkling Psalter. Snowdrops recur here (“When I saw the snowdrops in the snow,”) and in Psalm 8 (“The snowdrops writhe underfoot and I think about what is real.”) This won’t be the last we’ll see of them. To me, they point to the realness of things and the way reality takes a long time to live our way into.

Poem for Psalm 88

The fever year began 
Between two cars of a train.
I pressed my hand to the wall and rattled.
Fear thundered in me. Midnight passed.
Panicseed sprouted everywhere.
My heart paced the beat beat 
Beat of things going faster.
I thought: What is happening? 
I thought: Send it back. I don’t want it anymore.

That year I lay in bed and sweated.
I slept with rosary beads,
But couldn’t remember why.
My prayers were all gasping.
The waltzing clock tripped madly on 
And I rasped across the pitted contours of 
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

I made coffee and watched videos
Of people driving snow plows 
At night on empty highways.
I went out for cigarettes 
And came back to shiver in bed.
I woke at night chasing
The tail end of dreams, tasting blood
And it tasted the way fear tasted. 
This is what it has come to. 
I kept taking shallow breaths.
I kept thinking: Trashfire and oblivion.
To ash. To ash. Away.

The bells of that year rattled things awake.
The present dissembled while 
The future wrung its hands and
The past stood up like a dead man
From its shallow grave,
Hastily dug, filled with wrath. 
But I didn’t understand any of it.
Lives I didn’t know I’d lived returned,
Things I couldn’t believe I’d said,
Things that I always thought had happened
To someone else. 
I thought: My God,
I never knew I had lost so much.

My friends shunned me. I blackened.
I writhed and waited for the return 
Of the things I lost to the water. 
I was humbled, violate, sepulchral. I raised
My hands but nothing took them.
I was a spinning marionette,
Limbs flung, a hungry ghost 
In the tempest reaching
But never touching.
I cried out day and night,
But was only flayed.
People asked me what was wrong
When the face that wore my face made a smile.
When they noticed the thing that watched them 
From the dark points of my eyes.
I reassured them, but what I didn’t say was:
“It is a long way back if you get lost.”
And: “Where were you when the dark 
Chewed away at the colorful dream?”

God, in those days I hardly knew 
What it meant to be crushed. 
But that is when I learned.
I hoped for all the wrong things
And got what I hoped for.
I feared all the wrong things and fled them. 
I see now like I never did.
I have spent so much time afraid.
My happiness was all glass.
I prayed to be thrown aloft like thistledown
But only laid abed and sweated
And worried at the promises of the Almighty.

How I wanted the year to change,
The dead to rise and run,
The darkling to pass. Instead, 
The sorrow wasn’t stopped.
When I heard wind chimes,
When I smelled woodsmoke,
When I saw the snowdrops in the snow,
My hands tingled and I had to sit down.
The panic flared and I covered my face.
I kept trying to recover.
I kept trying to breathe. 
Nothing took.
Nothing answered back.
The dark abides.

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Read more from Andy on Still Point (reflections on deconstruction and why people leave Christianity) and Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God).

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