How Do You Read?
Psalm 77
“Has His kindness ceased forever, have visions from Him come to and end? Have the inmost parts of God dried up?” (77:8) Up all night pacing the floor, singing, praying, unable to sleep or lay down, tying to make something happen, trying to hear a word, see a vision—nothing. The writer of Psalm 77 even speculates that God might be sick; that something has dried up inside God; that maybe his right hand (the one that reaches to us) has withered.
I want more
Read the Bible long enough, over years and years, teaching and preaching and you get what this author is going through. Sometimes, they are just words on a page that seem no longer capable of meaning, or they mean the same that they’ve meant for the last hundred times you’ve come across them. What was once insight seems like scratching the surface, assumed interpretations. I want more, I want to go deeper. In his attempt to penetrate the silence of God, the psalmist tries to remind God of another time, when God emerged from the depth of the waters. “Your passage was through the sea, your train upon the cosmic waters and so your heels were not seen” (77:19) “the heavens echoed with your voice….” Is this a reference to the Genesis, where creation emerged from the waters of chaos, where God’s voice called meaning into being from the depths of the cosmic waters?
Below the surface
In The Particulars of Rapture, Avivah Gotleib Zorenberg talks about the Biblical conscious and the Biblical unconscious. The Biblical conscious is the narratives that emerge from the depths and are set on dry land where we can see or hear the plain meaning, the unmuddled voice of God, but there are still meanings below the surface of the water. God reveals God’s self readily at times, but at others there seems to be truths that need to be gone after. One needs to get wet, dive into the chaos of the cosmic waters. It is the tension of the interplay of what is made plain and what is obscured that is necessary to glimpse anything like “the word of God”. Sometimes we sit on the shore with our understanding; sometimes we get pulled under, with the fear that we might never resurface.
The Hardest Question
We hope that [TheHardestQuestion] can serve as a sort of conversation about these expeditions in the Biblical texts assigned by the Lectionary so that we can together through posts and comments on the posts move from above to below the surface and back again.
Perhaps the hardest question of all is this most intensely personal one: How do you read?
Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota and the curator of The Hardest Question.
