The psalms to the rescue: Psalm 13.

The psalms to the rescue! I always wonder what exactly it is that people have in mind when they say that the Bible 'helps' them. What sort of help? I can only say for myself that it provides what I call 'mental furniture'. It's the equivalent of the ancient pieces you have, not antiques which have been bought specially to be old, but rather the pieces of furniture which have gone old while you have owned them, that you can't get rid of, however shabby or even ricketty they were to get, because they symbolise too much. And what a burden it is to be a person who lives in symbols! I have known some people who can travel light in that way, just discarding and getting new as they go. But I find it hard to get rid of so much as a sock belonging to someone, as there seems to be something of them in it. It's a burden, I tell 'ee! And also an odd kind of materialism that I don't like in myself.

But I meant to talk about mental furniture, not the physical stuff. So this morning, we sang psalm 13, which is one of those where the music really does have to reflect the mood, and so it is sung in a minor key for most of the time, and then at the end there is the up-turn and it swings into major. It's really the BP's psalm, the cry of the bi-polar, who feels forgotten by God; 'he takes no notice of me at all'. It's as though he has something like I have on this blog set-up, a 'stats' facility, thus I can count how many 'hits' there have been in a day, i.e. people reading my blog. (I try not to be obsessive, of course.) It looks as though the psalmist is doing this with God; he feels to have had no 'hits' from God at all, and he wants God's consideration, both for its own sake, and also because he doesn't want his enemy to be gloating over his cast-aside status.

But then there is a change in the last two verses of this six-verse psalm, and all of a sudden it's about trusting, rejoicing, singing, because of what is really non-information - God has 'dealt bountifully with' him. ??? There is no indication at all as to why this mood change happens; some of course speculate that the psalmist has been lamenting in the temple, and a priest has stepped forward with words of assurance of God's blessing, whose words are not recorded here, only the psalmist's response. But we don't know this; all we know is that a psalm has been written which is full of misery in the first 4 verses, and then in the last 2 there is a complete change of mood, a cloud is lifted. I think it's much better that we don't know why he feels different all of a sudden. It means that there is a psalm which reflects the experience that I sometimes have (and don't we all?) of feeling 'out of sorts' (oh I love these English understatements!) and then of feeling the start of the cloud lifting, for no apparent reason. There is a psalmist who shares my experiences, even shares my character.

For some reason, finding ourselves (and I mean that almost literally - like in an old photo - 'oh look, that's me!') in the Bible is reassuring. Why? Perhaps because when that 'me' is reassured by God's presence, I can share in the reassurance he experiences there and elsewhere.  John Rogerson says of psalm 22: 'It was the cry of someone who could pray, not in a general way to any God, but to my God, who was sustained by the memory of past mercies and nourished by the traditions of a community of faith; the cry of someone who had experienced God's faithfulness and who had come to the inner assurance that that faithfulness would never prove to be an illusion'. (The Psalms in Daily Life, SPCK 2001.)