[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Psalm 91

We had it again, this morning; it comes around (of course) on a regular 
basis, Psalm 91. And each time it cycles through the lectionary, I find 
myself regarding it from a slightly different standpoint.

I used to argue with it a whole lot. It struck me as being almost cruel to 
say "God will protect you; you'll be safe" when, for so many people, that 
simply isn't true. I would think of the Jews herded into freezing cattle 
cars, on their way to Auschwitz, murmuring the psalm to their children -- 
and no, the heavens did not open for flights of angels to lift them up so 
that no foot got bruised by a stone. No one came to stand between them and 
their humiliation and destruction. When I thought of them, the psalm seemed 
bitter to me, a reproach.

Sometimes I'd think that the psalm applied only to certain lucky people, 
the chosen ones, whose lives were mostly trouble-free, or at least as much 
as any human life is: the good people who married and stayed married, 
raised kids who turned out well, had regular hours and finances, lived in 
clean and well-kept houses, had friendships going back forty years.... If 
you grow up in a family as dysfunctional as mine was, there's a wistful 
tendency to picture a white-picket-fence world, where all is loving and 
regular and well-run. It takes a very long time to dispose of that 
illusion. Psalm 91 was, for me, a white-picket-fence sort of statement, 
good for that world, but not for mine.

Or I'd feel it as a piece of whistling-in-the-dark: if I'm really good, 
God, you'll protect me; you'll make sure that I don't get hurt, that 
nothing jumps out front behind the door. I shall be spared the discovery of 
suspicious lumps; no truck will nail me or mine to the pavement. So much of 
old-time religion (as in Jesus' time) was just making sure that the gods 
were properly propitiated. God, I just have to buy your favour with 
unquestioning devotion and then nothing awful will happen to me.

But I'd tried that kind of devotion, and guess what? It didn't work.  In 
fact, getting religion never did make my life any easier, far from it. When 
I looked around, I saw the same thing in others: even quite devout 
Christians weren't necessary having an easy time of it. In fact, I saw that 
devoutness and psychospiritual health were independent variables, as they 
say in the stats biz. I saw people who had no religious life to speak of, 
but who were clearly healthy, happy people; I also saw Christians who were 
absolutely radiant with joy in spite of the difficulties they struggled 
with -- but I also saw atheists full of paranoid rage and Christians whose 
psyches didn't bear close examination. It's such a mixed back that I, for 
one, can't figure it out.

One way or another, I had trouble with the psalm. Only a couple of years 
ago could I read it through in church without actively quarreling with it, 
a major step forward.

This morning was different. This morning, I could see it as simply true.

Not in the literal sense. We often get into trouble by insisting that 
Scriptural truths are court-of-law truths, mere data, provable. When they 
don't turn out to be court-of-law truth, our faith collapses, because we've 
given primacy to a way of knowing that is, in fact, limited and fallible -- 
our own perception, our own way of determining truth. The fact is that 
however-many-thousands of Jews went to their deaths praying to be saved, 
not in some mythic or poetic sense, but literally, in the here and how, and 
it didn't happen.

But our literalness stems from our limitedness. We operate only in 
_chronos_, our own small sense of time, not in God's time, _kairos_. We 
live maybe 80 years, if we're in a first-world country and prosperous 
enough; we've already forgotten so much that we knew only a couple of 
hundred years ago. We're not much different from aphids in time's regard, 
and that's all the time we know. Same goes for space: I know my own small 
corner of a very large country on a small, jewel-like planet around a 
third-rate star, floating in space unimaginably huge.

So my jaundiced view of the psalm is only really a litany of my own 
limitations. It says very little about God's true nature and power, which 
are completely outside my grasp. I cannot walk around God; I can only feel 
the hints of imagination.

Those hints speak of love.

What the psalm is about is the absolute trustworthiness of love, not about 
literal physical safeguarding. God has not, in fact, protected my feet from 
the stones; my toes have been bruised and battered and scorched with the 
exhalations of dragonlets. But nonetheless, God has been *there* for me, 
with me, under me, around me, upholding me, sustaining me, bearing me up, 
so that in the long run, I may emerge from desert times and enter into the 
kingdom of joy. It's becoming a possibility.

It should be indecent to be truly happy in Lent, but then, I usually get 
things backwards. I promise to keep the "alleluias!" hidden for the next 
few weeks, but I'm hanging on to their prospect.

The psalm is true, really true, although maybe not next Tuesday, or even 
the Tuesday after that. But it says something essential: there is love, and 
love will bear you up, whatever else befalls you.