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The psalms of lament
Persisting in prayer when God is silent by Kathleen Harmon
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raying the psalms forms us in a spirituality borne of Israel’s jagged journey of faith as they moved by fi ts and starts along the path to salvation God was continually opening for them. We learn from praying the psalms that we human beings cannot provide salvation for ourselves. In our
search for fullness of life we are easily misled either by outside evildoers or by our own inside desires and weaknesses. It is God alone who can save. We learn from praying the psalms that the God who saves is relentless in off ering us salvation. No infi delity on our part and no evildoing on the part of others ever stops God from reaching out toward us in infi nite love. We learn from praying the psalms that salvation is nothing less than God’s very giſt of God-Self to us; our part in salvation is simply to give ourselves back to God, freely and fully.
We also learn from praying
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the psalms how to persist in prayer when the God we address is silent. T is we learn above all from praying the psalms of lament. In this brief essay, we explore the general nature of psalms of lament, using Psalm 13 as our lens. We then refl ect on the text of Psalm 88, the one lament in the Hebrew Psalter which off ers us no words of trust in God, no ray of hope, no way out of ultimate dark- ness. We discover how praying Psalm 88 is, despite appearances to the contrary, a transforming act of faith.
most frequently employed literary genre in the Hebrew psalter is the lament. A lament typically begins with a cry to God for help. Some unspecifi ed evil, enemy, or disease threatens the one praying and he or she has turned to God for deliv- erance. Despite the frequency and intensity of the prayer, however, the one praying oſt en complains that God is not listening, that God delays in answering. Nonetheless, the one praying remains certain of God’s love and confi dent of God’s
How long must I bear pain in my soul,
January-February 2014 • WorshipArts •
www.UMFellowship.org Psalms of Lament. T e
ultimate intervention. Despite the psalmist’s tenuous situation and God’s seeming inattention, the lament always concludes with an expression of trust in God. We see this progression from
pain and complaint to praise and confi dence, for example, in Psalm 13.
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
UMNS photo by Mike DuBose
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