For God alone my soul waits in silence - reflection on Psalm 62
Reflection by Warren Hartley, LGBTQIA+ Ministry Facilitator as part of our series on the Psalms
Readings:
Psalm 62
Matthew 6:1-8
Good morning everyone.
It is great to be with you, I so rarely get here in the mornings these days and I miss being amongst this community. I also don’t frequently give reflections and it’s always a privilege to stand here before you, one I never take for granted.
Having said that God, and our Team Rector for that matter, have a mighty fine sense of humour asking me to reflect on the book of Psalms.
You see, I have to confess that I really struggle with the Psalms!
They contain profound beauty like Psalm 23 “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” and profound violence like Psalm 137 “Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
That latter one makes me what to slam the book shut and write the whole lot of them off. Also please don’t get me started on the profound arrogance of the self aggrandising statements about how fabulous the author is are and how rotten their enemies are before proceeding to call down God’s vengeance upon them.
I was once on a week long retreat in a monastery where the monks sang the daily offices each of which include multiple psalms. The singing was magnificent, and I was entranced. On day two I turned up and again listening to their beautiful voices resound through the chapel, my mind caught the words from Psalm 141 “They will say, “As one ploughs and breaks up the earth, so our bones have been scattered at the mouth of the grave.”
I could not reconcile the beauty of the singing and the chapel with the call in the psalm to plough up graves and scatter bones. This was compounded, as is customary, when the psalm closed with “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit”.
Really! Is God glorified in this! I was left feeling rather raw. I almost stood up and walked out of the service and I stopped attending the offices for the rest of the retreat week.
I hear many people describe their beautiful relationship to the psalms and how profoundly they speak to them, yet I’m left feeling bewildered by them. The psalms were the primary “hymn book” of the church for the past two millennia alongside our Jewish siblings for even longer. What is it then that draws people of our two faiths back to this collection of poems written well over 2000 years ago?
Why then did I agree to give a reflection on something I am….. at best….. ambivalent about?
Well two reasons.
Firstly, I find the process of preparing a reflection very helpful in chewing things over. It’s a great chance to read, reflect and attempt to focus my entirely unfocused brain on something …..I was about to say meaty but I’m a strict vegetarian….and I can’t quite find a suitable alternative metaphor!
Secondly, is my experience of Psalm 62. Again a number of years ago I was on retreat and I was struggling with what prayer meant. So much of the language of prayers is like the language of the psalms… beautiful yet often violent and self-aggrandizing.
I went for a walk up to the Rock Chapel at St Beuno’s perched on a high point away from the main centre. Inside the chapel I sat in the profound silence and I noticed this Psalm and it’s opening words “For God alone my soul waits in silence;” and it was a balm to my troubled soul.
I wonder if my ambivalence stems from two sources.
One is my fundamentalist upbringing where the bible was to be taken both very seriously and literally. The psalms, taken as a whole, are pretty nasty and horrible if I take them literally and I therefore can’t take them seriously. The world of the authors of the psalms is VERY different to the one I inhabit all these centuries later. No wonder I don’t “get them”.
Having said that, people are people so there will naturally be elements of the human expression in these poems that are still equally so today.
The other source of my ambivalence is, I wonder, because I want to look to the psalms like a nice soft poem. Something that inspires with its beauty. However poetry doesn't just do that. Good poetry is inspiring but it is also painful, shocking, disturbing, something that gets inside you and helps you see differently.
That’s the key “to help you see differently”
Perhaps that what the Psalms are. They are poems, certainly not meant to be taken literally, but attempts by authors ancient, to wrestle with the joys and crappiness of life and how God fits or doesn’t fit into it all. Poems that have the best of what it means to be human…. and the worst….. all mixed up and shaken about. These are NOT inspirational quotes for us to put on a pretty background and post on Facebook.
Instead they are the messy cries of messed up humans attempting to work things out as best they can in a mixed up and violent world.
So how might we do that in our time? Well this Psalm gives us a timeless clue
“For God alone my soul waits in silence”.
Silence
Stillness
Like Jesus’ words from our gospel reading “whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret”.
Let the words fall away and wait in silence. Most of my prayer life is now taken up in silence and I often hear the reminder from this Psalm to simply wait in silence for God.
That is all I need to do.
That’s it.
To just stop,
be still and wait.
Oh the beauty of stillness and silence in this busy and frantic world! My soul longs for it …….though I too often resist it’s embrace.
What does silence in prayer do for us, for me? Silence is about gaining a wider perspective. To see different, beyond the immediacy of my own finite and fallible viewpoint and to be transformed not merely to have clear cut answers.
We need transformed people today, and not just people with answers.
As Eugène Ionesco wrote, “Explanation separates us from astonishment . . . I do not want my teachings and my too many words to separate anyone from astonishment or to act as a substitute for inner experience. The marvellous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is all for the sake of astonishment—not “proof” or certainty! It’s for divine transformation (theosis), not intellectual or “small-self” coziness. Ideas are not a problem—but a true inner experience is something else. It changes us, and human beings do not like to change. The biblical revelation invites us into a genuinely new experience. The trouble is that we have made the Bible into a bunch of ideas—about which we can be right or wrong—rather than an invitation to a new set of eyes. “
And so, like Psalm 62 I invite you to try stepping into silence and let your soul wait in silence for God and to take on “a new set of eyes” awakening to astonishment and transformation.