[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Psalm 91 Redux

Every few years, Psalm 91 and I eye each other across the wrestling 
ring and prepare to engage once again. We had it in hymn form this 
morning in church, and it gave me to reflect. It always does.

To save you reaching for your Bible, Psalm 91 is the "Safety Psalm": 
You who dwell in the hand of the Lord have nothing to worry about 
because angels are going to descend and protect you from all manner 
of ill. You won't even skin a knee or stub a toe, because God is 
looking after you.

To quote Bill Cosby, "Riiiiiight."

This is one of the places where, if you take Scripture as literal 
factual truth, you are rapidly going to find yourself heading up the 
crick without a paddle. God does not, in fact, protect us from 
suffering. In fact, walking Godwardly tends to lead us deeper and 
deeper into suffering, following Jesus' example. God does not 
intervene to save us from earthquake, war, famine, domestic violence, 
or schoolyard bullying. This is very much a fallen world, our 
consequence, not God's choice.

And so taking Psalm 91 literally is not a spiritually healthy choice. 
It just gets a person terribly muddled, like that bit about God 
always giving us what we pray for. (My children might beg me for 
candy, but dammit, I'm going to give them bread. I might compromise 
about whole wheat.) If we assume that by turning our minds and hearts 
and souls towards God, life is going to become somehow simpler and 
problem-free, we have another think coming.

That was my first argument with Psalm 91. Life doesn't work that way.

But still, it's an incredibly compelling piece of work: the sense of 
resting in absolute security in God's loving purpose, like a newborn 
resting peacefully in its mother's arms. Here, nothing can harm me, 
nothing can hurt me, nothing can damage me or make me wounded or ill. 
God's in charge. God knows what God is doing, and I can trust in 
that. That's what animates the psalm and makes it beautiful.

Of late I've come to a new accommodation with the psalm. I feel as 
though I've gone through the wardrobe or the looking glass or 
whatever and have entered a strange new country, in which literal 
truth has been sent out to play on the sidewalk while Other Truth 
takes the best chair in the parlour.

And the best truth is this:

If you turn your soul Godward and persist in pointing it in that 
direction, no matter what life hands you in the way of horrible 
stuff, you will emerge eventually with your soul in battered but 
spiritually prosperous shape. The journey really does shape you, and 
the better you obey Meyer's Law ("in any emotionally difficult 
choice, the harder path is probably the right one") the more you are 
apt to fetch up in a space where angels *have* upheld you ever step 
of the way, even though it didn't feel like that at the time.

We only figure out the angelic upholding business after the fact, not 
in the middle of it. Sometimes it feels as though the angelic horde 
is dragging you along a bony mesa, scraping your knees to bloody 
rubble instead of keeping you from stubbing a toe. But in fact, the 
soul emerged not just unstubbed but radically transformed by the 
experience. Love grows with being tested, although not because being 
tested is right, but because the choice to love is right. Hard as it often is.

What matters isn't the safety of my toes, finances, emotions, life, 
desires: what matters is what I make of my soul. By entrusting *that* 
to God, I ensure that I safely carry out of this life the one and 
only thing that I can take with me to the other side of the River. I 
ensure that what is essential to me lives in safety, however much the 
rest of me is tested and battered. And so, in the end, the psalm is true.


Because you have made the Lord your refuges,
the Most High your dwelling place,
no evil shall befall you,
no scourge come near your tent.
For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways.
On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.



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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in 
no other way. -- Mark Twain