With Unflinching Honesty | Monday Invocation
“O Lord, God of my salvation, at night, when I cry out before you, let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry.”
Psalm 88:1-2 NRSVUE
Psychologist, Dan Allender, emphasizes the importance of story in the human experience. It is how we understand and make meaning of our lives. Story brings connection, realization, and allows us to process our experiences. The ability to tell stories of difficult times is particularly important. Allender states, “The capacity to enter grief brings comfort. The capacity to enter anger moves us into hope.”
Oftentimes the stories of our lives do not follow a neat template, even when we might prefer that simplicity. Sometimes our story is simply grief, simply pain. There may be no end in sight. We might not see a happy ending or even be confident that we will have one. Yet, the telling of the story is an important and powerful act.
In Psalm 88, the psalmist is clearly in anguish. They blame God for their suffering. They question God’s goodness, and they do not reach a neat conclusion. They don’t come around to defend God’s character. They don’t come around to a hopeful outlook. They simply express their pain and rage.
The fact that the scriptures contain the full, unfiltered gravity of this author’s anger serves as an invitation to our own anger. The world brims with reasons for mourning and rage. As Paul says, all of creation groans as we wait for redemption (Romans 8:23). And in Psalm 88, we see that there is space for holy rage, and in fact there is power in voicing it. The story we tell may not be happy or complete, but the act of telling it is important.
Psalm 88 has served as a holy text for centuries which reveals the holiness of our own raw emotions and connects them to a long line of deep feelers and truth tellers. Our participation in the life of the Divine encompasses the depths of each emotion and experience. By voicing or writing or drawing or dancing or sobbing or painting or singing our experiences–by expressing them however we are able to express them–we allow our stories to be seen and held by others and by our own selves.
May we, like the Psalmist, tell the true stories of our circumstances with unflinching honesty. May we share our stories freely. May they be held communally. And may the telling be transformative.
Looking for more from our Queering the Psalms series? Click the button below to see other readings from the book of Psalms that we have explored.