Spirituality of the Psalms

Chris, Daryl and I finally managed to get this double-storey terrace house in Pinggiran Putra. We confirmed and paid a deposit to the agent on Monday. This morning, I met both the agent and the house owner to sign the agreement and to obtain the keys to the house. Now I can start moving. Agnes and her friend, Yun Fern, helped me to clean the house. In between carrying heavy stuff, cleaning and packing, I managed to sneak a few moments of reading time into the tight schedule.

Now I am into another book, called ‘Spirituality of the Psalms’ by Walter Brueggemann. It’s quite theological and I couldn’t understand the preface at all. As I progressed however, I found a lot of insights into how we can look at and study the psalms. It’s another refreshing read from another author who is also involved with emerging theology. Brueggemann categorizes the psalms into three general themes: psalms of orientation, psalms of disorientation and psalms of new orientation. According to him, human life is mirrored in these spiritual songs where we continuously move from a state of orientation to a state of disorientation and then to a state of new orientation. He theorizes:

Human life consists in satisfied seasons of well-being that evoke gratitude for the constancy of blessing. Matching this we will consider psalms of orientation, which in a variety of ways articulate the joy, delight, goodness, coherence, and reliability of God, God’s creation, and God’s governing law.

Human life consists in anguished seasons of hurt, alienation, suffering, and death. These evoke rage, resentment, self-pity, and hatred. Matching this, we will consider psalms of disorientation, poems and speech-forms that match the season in its ragged, painful disarray.

Human life consists in turns of surprise when we are overwhelmed with the new gifts of God, when joy breaks through the despair. Where there has been only darkness, there is light. Corresponding to this surprise of the gospel, we will consider psalms of new orientation, which speak boldly about a new gift from God, a fresh intrusion that makes all things new.

But human life is not simply an articulation of a place in which we find ourselves. It is also a movement from one circumstance to another, changing and being changed, finding ourselves surprised by a new circumstance we did not expect, resistant to a new place, clinging desperately to the old circumstance. One move we make is out of a settled orientation into a season of disorientation. It is that move that characterizes much of the psalms in the form of complaint and lament. The other move we make is a move from a context of disorientation into a new orientation. The second move also characterizes many of the psalms, in the form of songs of thanksgiving and declarative hymns that tell a tale of a decisive time, an inversion, a reversal of fortune, rescue, deliverance, saving, liberation, healing.

Regarding the psalms of disorientation, and why most of us choose to ignore such psalms, he says:

Such a denial and cover-up, which I take it to be, is an odd inclination for passionate Bible users, given the large number of psalms that are songs of lament, protest, and complaint about the incoherence that is experienced in the world. At least it is clear that a church that goes on singing happy songs in the face of raw reality is doing something very different from what the Bible itself does.

I think that serious religious use of the complaint psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow and act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God’s loss of control.

The point to be urged here is this: The use of these psalms of darkness may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith, albeit a transformed faith. It is an act of bold faith on the one hand, because it insists that the world must be experienced as it really is and not in some pretended way. On the other hand, it is bold because it insists that all such experiences of disorder are a proper subject for discourse with God. Nothing is out of bounds, nothing precluded or inappropriate. Everything properly belongs in this conversation of the heart. To withhold parts of life from that conversation is in fact to withhold part of life from the sovereignty of God. Thus these psalms make the important connection: everything must be brought to speech, and everything brought to speech must be addressed to God, who is the final reference for all of life.