I am told that the chief Rabbi of Ukraine has asked Christians to join him in reciting Psalm 31 for the beleaguered cities tonight, so I thought I would also post this poetic reflection on that harrowing and comforting psalm.
Psalm 31 is one of those psalms that express best the paradox of the whole psalter: that even when we feel like we are falling apart we are still held together by God, even when we cry to God that we have been forgotten, God still remembers us. So even though the psalmist tells God exactly how he is feeling:
I am clean forgotten, as a dead man out of mind: I am become like a broken vessel.
he can still come in the same psalm to the great ‘nevertheless’ on which so many of the psalms often turn:
Nevertheless, thou heardest the voice of my prayer: when I cried unto thee.
But the other phrase in this psalm which it seemed to me really spoke into our time as I prayed it was in verse 15: ‘fear is on every side’
Perhaps because the psalmist is honest about this fear he finds that God has an answer for it and gives us that mysterious and beautiful verse in which he reveals that God has a secret meeting place with all of us who trust him even in the midst of our fears:
Thou shalt hide them privily by thine own presence from the provoking of all men: thou shalt keep them secretly in thy tabernacle from the strife of tongues.
The internet and 24 hour news mean that we live, even more than the psalmist, amidst ‘the strife of tongues’, what I have called in my poem the ‘cacophony of condemnations’, so we have all the more need of that secret and all restoring tryst with our Lord in his deep silence and his mystery.
You can hear me read the poem by clicking on the title:
The night withdrew and joy came in the morning,
When I remembered that I was remembered,
That even through the bitter tears of mourning
I was sustained, the darkest powers were hindered
In their insidious work within my soul
And I was held together and re-membered
By your unceasing love. You made me whole
When all the world was tearing me apart.
When there was fear on every side, you stole
Into the secret garden of my heart
A good thief in the night, and hid with me
In your strong tabernacle, held apart
From all that strife of tongues, cacophony
Of condemnations, so you kept me safe
In your deep silence and your mystery.
Republished with gracious permission from Malcolm Guite’s website.
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The featured image is “The Return of the Prodigal Son” (between 1667 and 1670) by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Thank you for this post. I did not know about it until I was led to it by a close friend and fellow believer, for which I have thanked him profusely.
The post is beautifully written and vital for the times we live in. It has already become the balm of my soul as I come to reckon with the horror of a nation of defenceless Ukrainians brutalized by a war mongering nation of Russians. Have yourselves a wonderful and relaxing weekend.
Very touched by the poetry. I felt as if I were lead to this. I am also a poet and and I intercede. I was reading Psalm 31.
Beautiful, many thanks