Psalm 30 - Waves
I remember first learning about the stages of grief and (typical of how I generally engage the world) thought of them as a straught line. Denial --> Anger --> Bargaining --> Depression --> Acceptance. It wasn’t until I started journeying with people through their grief and then starting to deal with some of my own that I began to see that it is far from a straight line. In fact, it is far more squiggly than even this photo seems to indicate. My experience of the grief that I have faced in my life is that it is like a series of waves that come. Some are like high tide at the beach with huge crashes and sometimes it is far more gentle but still waves rolling in.
Grief is what I thought of with Psalm 30. The Psalm begins with an expression of gratitude for God’s work:
I will lift you up
As you have lifted me
Up from my oppressors
That they might not rejoice at my lowliness
In my crying out to you
I was healed
It continues this way for several more verses and then...this...
But then you hid from me
And I was terrified...
What profit is there in my blood
When I go down to the grave?
Will the dust speak your praises?
Will it strain like me to utter your truth?
And then it comes toward the end with this verse...
You have changed my grieving into dancing!1
This is why I love the Psalms. They show the reality of how we experience the world - that it isn’t always a straight line of 5 stages of grief or A-B-C-D-E etc. Life is messy and times come when all feels great and then sometimes it feels like a light switch gets flipped and all seems upside down. But again, the beauty of the Psalms, is that these realities are included in what is considered by so many to be holy words.
I shared with a friend recently that I feel like the Psalms saved my life. I didn’t say it in a literal sense but they very much helped me to walk through these up and down periods and I am grateful to be back in them now, in a time that feels very much like that once again for a lot of reasons. From what I hear and see from others, I don’t think I’m alone in this either. I hope that this photo and these words from Fischer’s translation spoke into how you feel today.
Grace, Peace, Love, and Joy,
Ed
PS - Shortly in Ordinary BenchMarks, we’ll be coming to a time of reflecting on the Psalms with the bench. If you haven’t had a chance to pick up the book, here’s more information on my site and also the link on Amazon. You can also download a PDF sample of the first few days here.
PPS - Scout moment of the day…
The pawprints are obvious but the other marks were from her lapping up some of the last of the snow on the grass… mlem-marks…
Fischer, Norman. Opening to You, Pages 44-45
“I will lift you up
As you have lifted me
Up from my oppressors
That they might not rejoice at my lowliness”
As I read this my heart went to those who are being harmed by what is going on in the current authoritarian regime. People are not being lifted up, they are being brought down very low. And I thought about my trans nephew, and I thought about my Black friends and my Hispanic friends and all the havoc that is being wreaked in their lives. And then I thought about how the people in charge are rejoicing at their “lowliness” and a wave of grief that was so deep washed over me that I could actually feel weight on me. I feel like I’ve been carrying this grief ever since the election. I hope it’s OK that I’m referring to current events in my musing over this psalm. And it’s not a grief that we will quickly get to the other side of, so to speak, this is a grief that comes from a knowledge that these are far-reaching actions, and that individuals and families are being harmed on an hourly basis in this country. I am devastated. My hope is very thin on the ground right now.