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A young woman wrote James Dobson, saying, "Four years ago, I was dating a man and became pregnant. I was devastated! I asked God, 'Why have You allowed this to happen to me?'"
Ray "Boom-Boom" Mancini gave his Korean boxing opponent a hard right to the head. The boxing match had been brutal for both fighters. The Korean boxer fell, after the right, to the canvas. He did not leave the ring alive; he suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrage. At a press conference following the Korean's demise, Mancini spoke, "Sometimes I wonder why God does the things he does."
A famous Holywood actress had a lover who rolled off a yacht in an intoxicated stupor. He drown. During an interview, the grieving actress, looking into the camera, asked, "How could a loving God let this happen?"
Dan Jansen's hand scrapped the ice in the 1994 Winter Olympics, causing him to lose the 500-meter race. Robin, his wife, cried out, "Why, God, again? God can't be that cruel!"
After Princess Diana died, Philip Yancey, a popular Christian writer, received a call from a television producer. He asked, "Can you appear on our show? We want you to explain how God could possibly allow such a terrible accident."
Susan Smith pushed her two sons into a lake to drown them. She blamed a carjacker for the act. In her official confession, she said, "I dropped to the lowest point when I allowed my children to go down that ramp into the water without me. I took off running and screaming, "Oh God! Oh God, no! What have I done? Why did you let this happen?"
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"God" gets blame for results of our most unwise choices to simply incidents truly unfair and that we did not directly cause but, still, being human means we are not immune to them.
The Psalms, in the Old Testament, have many Songs of Complaint, religious songs expressing the felt-injustice experienced by a person or the faith community. These are songs expressing felt-dissary. The sense is that stability, which we feel is what ought to be, has been disrupted, chaos has invaded the ordering of creation, at least in our regard.
These psalms arises from genuine, strong faith in God and,thus, contrast with the oft soft-peddled theology that says so easily that, "Well, God did this, and we have to trust He had a reason," or "How could God allow this?" The Psalms do not allow us these easy escapes.
The Psalms contain points at which the God of Israel is blamed for the dissary. This honesty of feeling and perception is an expression of faith in the God blamed; faith in the God allows communication between devotee and God not to cease.
The Psalms provide us the legitimate openning in communal liturgy and private devotion to avoid sanitized piety that is not fully honest before Divine Presence. Sacral imagery and language of pain is itself an act of devotion and witness to love in the relationship of LORD-worshpper-faith community.
Because liturgical language in the Lament Psalms is formulaic, borrowed from devotional language at hand to all the community, often the precise stimulus of dissaray is unclear. This is at times not the case, however. A case is Psalm 42, referring to scornful words of foes ~ there remains no clarification who the foes are.
Psalm 42 (CEV)
1As a deer gets thirsty
for streams of water,
I truly am thirsty
for you, my God.
2In my heart, I am thirsty
for you, the living God.
When will I see your face?
3Day and night my tears
are my only food,
as everyone keeps asking,
"Where is your God?"
4Sorrow floods my heart,
when I remember
leading the worshipers
to your house. I can still hear them shout
their joyful praises.
5Why am I discouraged?
Why am I restless?
I trust you!
And I will praise you again
because you help me,
6and you are my God.
I am deeply discouraged
as I think about you
from where the Jordan begins
at Mount Hermon
and from Mount Mizar. 7Your vicious waves
have swept over me
like an angry ocean
or a roaring waterfall.
8Every day, you are kind,
and at night
you give me a song
as my prayer to you,
the living LORD God.
9You are my mighty rock. Why have you forgotten me?
Why must enemies mistreat me
and make me sad?
10Even my bones are in pain,
while all day long
my enemies sneer and ask,
"Where is your God?"
11Why am I discouraged?
Why am I restless?
I trust you!
And I will praise you again
because you help me,
and you are my God.
The foes utilize the psalmist's devotion to God against him. Their language device is scorn. What is scorn?
Scorn is a desperate affective-language move seeking to strike at the heart of a person's or group's dignity, and this can be done by a scofful repudiation of a deepest sense of allegiance, or loyalty. Fundamentally, scorn is a power-move from someone who feels in a weak position but consciously or unconsciously seeks to validate strength and control through derison. Scorn is approaching an ultimate act of seeking to hurt the other by disdain, to cut at the heart in veageance. This is such a move as to seek to render the other the captive of self-questioning and shame. Scorn exceeds all other forms of argumentation and the usual defenses of anger; scorn is an attempt, indeed, to overpower by de-validating the person of the other. Scorn is not to win an argument but to strike at the other's essence treated as object, not another like subject.
In extreme, scorn takes the form of religious. One seeks to blaspheme the other's relationship with God to cut to the heart of his or her sense of love and devotion for the Divine. This, of course, is a conscious attempt to render one into a position of shame. This is saying, "You are a fake. A liar."
This derision, with its attempt to cause the power of shame to dis-empower the psalmist, is what the psalm communicates. Foes speak, "Where is your God?" The psalm shows that this is not a sincere question. The query is an attack on the faith of the psalmist, to cause pain.
In 42.9 the psalm notes this attack on faith and relationship with God. Persons "mistreat" and "make sad" the psalmist. We get a glimpse into the psalmist's emotional pain.
In 42.10 we have notation of the act of scorn. "My enemies sneer," writes the psalmist. Sneering is a visual act to join with scornful words for fuller impact; scorn and sneering are essentially one act. To sneer is to show scorn by a derisive smile or express disdain by curling the uppper lip. The word, ironically, is akin in origin to the word "snarl."
The psalmist, like lament psalms generally, places the pain within the context of faith, even if angry, disappointed, or doubting faith. Therefore, Psalm 42 affirms the loyalty of the psalmist to the faith and God's fidelity.
This counter-move is an act of defiant faith, a faith that will not surrender to the belittlement in return or relinquish faith upon its being questioned by another. The theologial content of the Psalm shows how the commmon langauge of the faith community is utilized as a counter-move to the language of derision that seeks to discredit devotional loyalty.
Indeed, the psalmist is faced with two choices. One choice is counter-attack through a non-sacral language move. Another is affirmation of the very faith scorned. He chooses the latter.
For devout religious persons, scornfulness of his or her faith devotion is always a possibility. The closer a person or group is to the devotee, the more potential the utilization of scorn and the more potentially hurtful the derision.
Intimacy with God for a religious devotee must determine his emotional-language response to derision, indeed, any attack upon his or her loyalty to and love of the Divine Presence.
Prayer itself is a counter-move to the possibilities of shame induced by anyone or any group. This counter-move, as in Psalm 42, can be theocentrically-directed, scorn inducing a counter-movement into the very relationship called in question.
I am not saying this is all easy. I myself have been scorned and sneered at as a fake, a heretic, a hypocrite. As a person and pastor who has given up much for the faith, I can testify at the hurt that religous-scorn can bring to a person.
Psalm 42, and other of the Psalms, however, provide a visual and liturgical icon to help when our deepest loyalities are called into question to the extent of verbal-visual derision.
Jesus, also, provides instuctions on this matter:
10 They are blessed who are persecuted for doing good,
for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them.
11 "People will insult you and hurt you. They will lie and say all kinds of evil [harmful] things about you because you follow me. But when they do, you will be blessed. 12 Rejoice and be glad, because you have a great reward waiting for you in heaven. People did the same evil things to the prophets who lived before you. (Matthew 5.10-12, NCV)
38You know that you have been taught, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." 39But I tell you not to try to get even with a person who has done something to you. When someone slaps your right cheek, turn and let that person slap your other cheek. 40If someone sues you for your shirt, give up your coat as well. (Matthew 5.38-40, CEV)
I am not certain how literally Jesus would want us to receive abuse. His reference to offering the other cheek and giving the coat, however, reflects a general principle of a counter-move that disestablishes the derisive power-move.
Psalms, like Psalm 42, and Jesus' teachings provide us a way of non-violence. Within the teaching is a unversal principle that non-retaliation is wise and powerful and defeats efforts at the deligitimzing of self, integrity, faith, .... Indeed, I have seen in my own life how such derisive moves have invalidated the move of scorn; socrn contains its own seed of devalidation if it is not responded to with like-move.
Responding to scorn entails a conscious ability to question oneself, rather than simply assume you are free of all that might have lead toward the derision. Invalidating the other is not enough, or is validating your faith. Rather, derision can lead us to pray about our faith, how we might better evidence it. However, in this prayer, we must avoid the offered-shame of derision and, as the psalmist, center response on God. If we lapse into shame, scorn as been cooperated with, and we have moved focus from theocentric response to a self-centered one, which is the intent of the seen or unseen other who seeks to deligitimize our deepest loyalties.
I say "unseen" for there are spiritual forces often at work in extreme cases of personal or group attack. Any extreme-harmful response that is not the general character trait of a person or group is to an extent obsessional, if not possessional, regards malevolent unseen forces, energies, or spirits.
There are many hurtful things that can happen to us, regardless of our devotion. The Psalms provide varied responses, but even when blaming God for a time, worshippers pass through to a new beginning. Complaint Psalms almost always end with affirmation, not complaint.
The Psalms remind us, "No, God does not make these things happen. They happen. What happens to us is not the deciding factor. Responding with the langauge and acts of liturgical and private devotion, expressing our love for and trust in our Divine Beloved in pray, is vitally important and a counter-move biblical and loyal."
Every day, you are kind,
and at night
you give me a song
as my prayer to you,
the living LORD God.
*Brian K. Wilcox lives with his two beloved dogs, St. Francis and Bandit Ty, in Southwest Florida. He serves the Christ Community United Methodist Church, Punta Gorda, FL. Brian is vowed at Greenbough House of Prayer, a contemplative Christian community in Georgia. He lives a contemplative life and inspires others to experience a deeper relationship with Christ. He advocates for a spiritually-focused Christianity and the renewal of the focus of the Church on addressing the deeper spiritual needs and longings of persons and empathic relating with diverse spiritual traditions, East and West. Brian has an independent writing, workshop, and retreat ministry, for all spiritual seekers.
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