A Counter-Reading

From Psalm 55:

If this had been done by an enemy
I could bear his taunts.
If a rival had risen against me,
I could hide from him.

But it is you, my own companion, my intimate friend!
How close was the friendship between us.
We walked together in harmony in the house of God.

I am well aware that the accepted reading of this psalm is that of a prayer for justice. Someone has been wronged by a companion, a comrade, a fellow brother or sister. One has been betrayed by the other.

But while reading this psalm I have had a Nathan-meets-David moment. Suppose it is I who is the false friend?

Sin is the distance between who we are and what we are. I can read this psalm as an unwitting prayer of lament for my estrangement from God and from my true self, the person I was created to be.

O God, listen to my prayer, do not hide from my pleading, attend to me and reply; with my cares, I cannot rest....

O that I had wings like a dove to fly away and be at rest.
So I would escape far away and take refuge in the desert.

Sometimes God hides. Most of the time we are the ones who do the hiding.

I tremble at the shouts of the foe, at the cries of the wicked; for they bring down evil upon me.
They assail me with fury.

When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Sin hardens our heart and casts a veil on all that we perceive. A rose shows us only its thorns. A soothing word only clangs in our ears. The good and true and beautiful appears meaningless and ugly. All the world is ours, but when we are caught and crushed in the vise-grip of fractured relationships, we are stuck in a crumbling nutshell.

I would hasten to find a shelter from the raging wind, from the destructive storm, O Lord, and from their plotting tongues.

Sin corrupts one of our most precious gifts from God: the power of imagination and its corollary in our senses, the power of perception. Indeed, there are winds and storms, and they blow where they will, for purposes unknown to us. Shall we judge them to be raging and destructive, on the evidence of our perceptions?

For I can see nothing but violence and strife in the city.
Night and day they patrol high on the city walls.

It is full of wickedness and evil; it is full of sin.
Its streets are never free from tyranny and deceit.

Of course, there really is violence and strife in the city of man. These are the visible marks of sin, for which we are responsible collectively but usually not culpable individually. Make no mistake: we are sinned against. But which is greater, the transgression or the source of the transgression? Understand this: our own thrown-ness, our common ownership of sin, becomes so heavy and loathsome that we project it falsely onto others, blaming our friends and loved ones individually for every fear and anxiety that assails us. Our lying perceptions are the precursors to our violent interfaces with the world. And our wayward perceptions tragically become the reality from which we cannot flee.

Adam and Eve committed a transgression in the garden, but God did not banish them for it. They were expelled for denying their responsibility. This is the sin that leads to all transgressions.

As for me, I will cry to God and the Lord will save me.
Evening, morning and at noon I will cry and lament.

Sometimes God says no.

He will deliver my soul in peace in the attack against me: for those who fight me are many, but he hears my voice.

God answers our prayers in ways we can never fully predict, and never according to what we expect. One might imagine that those "many" who fight this tortured soul are not enemies out there or other external forces but rather a part of that soul as the demonic, which is to say destructive, forms of culture we have embodied.

And even in the midst of our demonic condition, there is a voice that cries out loud and true from within our fractured selves. This voice, God will hear.

God will hear and will humble them, the eternal judge: for they will not amend their ways.
They have no fear of God.

We believe God, and yet we reject God. We promise to change, but we cannot change. We tremble before the holy, but we cast off God recklessly. We are confident in karmic vengeance, ever denying that deliverance may require us to be delivered up.

The traitor has turned against his friends; he has broken his word.
His speech is softer than butter, but war is in his heart.
His words are smoother than oil, but they are naked swords.

We never fail to see in others what we fail to see in ourselves.

Entrust your cares to the Lord and he will support you.
He will never allow the just man to stumble.

But you, O God, will bring them down to the pit of death.
Deceitful and bloodthirsty men shall not live half their days.

God will save who we are and do away with what we must not be. God will reunify who we are with what we are. Those demonic forms that we embody falsely, these will be brought down to the pit of death. God will put self-destroying tendencies toward deceit and violence to death. May it be done quickly!

O Lord, I will trust in you.

May it be so.