Why Do You Hide Your Face

God of his salvation — that is what he calls you in the first line, and then he says nothing good about you for seventeen verses.

He cries out to you in the day. He is before you at night. You do not come. He does not say you felt far off; he says you did it, with your own hand. You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep (Psalm 88:6). Your wrath lies heavy upon me (Psalm 88:7). You have caused my companions to shun me (Psalm 88:8). Every door that shut on him was shut by you.

Then it stops. You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness (Psalm 88:18). There is no last verse where morning comes. You let a man write that in your book and did not answer him inside it.

I want to know why you kept it.

Because I would not have. I would have asked him for one more line — the mercy he knew perfectly well was there, since he opened with it — and called it honesty. It would have been a lie. That is not comfort; that is getting out of the room.

He did not get out of the room. He stayed and kept talking to you — which is what I miss when I call him hopeless. Seventeen verses of dark, every one addressed to you. He has your name, and he will not stop saying it into the dark.

And you kept it. Not the resolution — the complaint. You put it among the songs and left it unanswered, so that anyone arriving in that place would find someone there before him, and his words not struck out.

There is one man who prayed this psalm to the bottom. He quoted another psalm from the cross. But he cried out in the day and was not heard, his companions became darkness, and at noon the darkness came down over the whole land. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46). A question in your own book, with no answer inside it. He did not get out of the room either. He said your name into the dark until there was no breath left. And on the third day you answered him — not with a line added to the end of the prayer, but with his body out of the grave.

I do not know. I am asking you.