Singing Without Words · pickerill casa

The Comfortable Words of Jesus today come from Matthew 27:46:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

This week I heard about a man in England who goes into prisons to run poetry workshops with inmates. I can imagine some hearing that and thinking it’s a ridiculous waste of time, energy, and resources. Some would say any investment in those incarcerated is wasted, that the only thing owed to an inmate is the certainty that he committed a crime and should feel it. The goal is punishment, not rehabilitation. But even those committed to rehabilitation might be skeptical of a poetry workshop: why an art class for people who need addiction recovery? Why poetry for people who need to learn to be parents?

The man running these workshops is a pastor, and his program is called The Psalmists. He sits with inmates and helps them enter the Psalms of Scripture and write their own, in their own words. Psalm 51, David’s great psalm of confession, is his frame. The inmates begin by lamenting, naming the unprocessed pain from their past. They turn toward repentance, facing the harm they caused. And they move toward ascent, finding hope in the darkest of places. One inmate was a bereaved father who’d lost his five-year-old son. He didn’t know what to do with the grief. He drank, ended up homeless, and was eventually sentenced for armed robbery. In a workshop exercise focused on writing an angry letter to God, he confronted his own anger at God over the loss. Over time, he recognized his own failures and came to a place of freedom. What the pastor has learned may surprise you: not only are inmates finding freedom in Christ, not only are they becoming emotionally and relationally healthier, but the program reports lower rates of reoffending.

It caused me to reflect more deeply on the nature and function of the Psalms, something I’ve found a deep place of resonance with personally this past year. In our own lives and families, and I think in the Bible too, you can see a number of ways we’re formed and shaped spiritually. We’re shaped through stories, through statements, through symbols, and through songs. Maybe you grew up with a parent or Sunday school teacher who didn’t just read the stories of Scripture to you, but narrated or even acted them out, as powerful to you as seeing a Broadway show. You felt like you were walking through the wet sand of the Red Sea yourself; you could smell the inside of Jonah’s fish. Others of you grew up in an environment that valued statements. Doctrines and creeds were primary. You grew up in a world of black and white, right and wrong. Others grew up in an environment of symbols, especially those from a more liturgical background. The cross, the altar, the incense, the art and the icons all pointed to a deeper mystery and reality of faith. And then there are those shaped by songs, by music, by the poetry of faith. We see all of these in Scripture, but sometimes we get the proportions off. Some of us eat only green beans, and after a while, not only do they get old, they aren’t the whole meal. For some of us, our faith is undernourished from a lack of song.

If you’ve ever followed a Bible reading guide for daily devotions, you’ll notice something true across traditions, from Catholic to Orthodox to Protestant: the Psalms show up more than any other daily reading. You may have one reading from the Old Testament, one from the Gospels, one from the New Testament letters. But you’ll have five different psalms show up, two or three to start the day and a few to end it. The songs of Scripture get an outsized proportion. Why is that?

Have you ever seen the footage of Henry, an older man in a nursing home suffering from dementia? He can’t remember his daughter’s name. He doesn’t recognize the staff caring for him. But when they put headphones on his head and play music from his younger years, he wakes right up. His blank stare turns into a twinkle in his eyes. He starts singing every word, waving his hands like he is conducting an orchestra. Researchers have found that the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain linked to music, memory, and emotion, is one of the last areas affected by Alzheimer’s. The more emotionally loaded the memory, the stronger the activity in that part of the brain. That’s what songs do to us.

But it’s not just singing, as important as that is. It’s also the unique way the words of the Psalms function for us. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a reflection on the Psalms shortly after returning to Germany from the United States in 1939. The Nazi fervor had taken over, and within six years Bonhoeffer would become a martyr. He reflected that the Psalms, unlike any other literature in Scripture, are our words to God. Everything else, the law, the prophets, the gospel, was God’s words to us. The Psalms give us words when we have a poverty of words, when we’ve lost our own, when we’re in the depths and have nothing left to cry out.

That’s exactly what we see with Jesus. His words from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, are one of his seven last sayings. But they aren’t originally his own words. They are the opening words of Psalm 22:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but find no rest. (Psalm 22:1-2, NRSV)

Jesus quoted Scripture a lot. When he was teaching his disciples, or challenging the religious authorities, he would teach from the Torah, from the Law and the Prophets, making an argument from these texts to settle a dispute or ground a teaching. But in the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours of his life, do you know what Scripture he was quoting? The Psalms.

At the Last Supper, about Judas:

He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me. (Psalm 41:9)

In the Garden of Gethsemane:

My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death. (Psalm 42)

About his suffering and passion:

They hated me without cause. (Psalm 35)

And, like Psalm 22, his final words from the cross:

Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. (Psalm 31)

The Psalms were his way of entering into the depths. Walter Brueggemann, a great Old Testament theologian, noted that the Psalms function in a way unlike any other genre in Scripture: they give you permission for every actual season of life, not just the acceptable ones. He maps three movements in the Psalms: orientation, the psalms of a life that makes sense; disorientation, the psalms of real lament, rage, doubt, and accusation, like we see here in the words of Christ; and reorientation, praise that’s different from the naivety of the first orientation because it’s earned, having come through the other side of suffering and loss. No other genre in Scripture authorizes the disorientation stage like the Psalms. Statements explain, stories resolve, symbols point to a deeper reality. But the psalms lament. They don’t neatly resolve, and they don’t always end happily. Some psalms you will never hear read in church, because they’re too bleak, or violent, or full of rage. Psalm 137 is the classic example. Its last verses read:

O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! (Psalm 137:8-9)

Someone might assign that psalmist an anger-management class or a forgiveness seminar.

But even then, praying the Psalms has a way of placing you in a larger arc of redemption. The end of the chapter is not the end of the story. The end of your story is not the end of His story, as they say. That’s what’s happening in Psalm 22. Jesus calls out verse one from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, and all around him, the rest of the psalm is being played out.

All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me, they shake their heads. (Psalm 22:7)

They stare and gloat over me; they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots. (Psalm 22:17-18)

But the story is not over. The psalm looks to a longer arc, to future generations, to things unseen. It closes:

To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him. Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it. (Psalm 22:29-31)

There is another side to this darkness, and to death itself. He crossed over to the other side, and we will too. Yes, there is a sleeping, but there will be a waking. I read a story this week of a woman who has known a tremendous amount of pain and injustice. She was accused of a heinous crime she didn’t commit, arrested in front of her children, convicted, and spent fifteen years in prison. No one arranged for her children to be cared for. She was despised in her small community. Days turned into months, then years. Her future was hopeless. She described that first Christmas in prison, when a staff member gathered everyone to sing Christmas carols. She couldn’t stand the sound of those songs. She was raging on the inside at the dissonance between her life and those songs. A few years ago, she was exonerated and released. Her life is still devastated in many ways. She lives on $494 a month in social security and has received no recompense for her wrongful imprisonment. But when she was interviewed for her story, she cradled her newest great-grandchild, thirteen days old, against her shoulder. She began to cry as she turned to nuzzle the baby’s cheek, saying, “See how God blessed me?”

Today, friend, no matter what you’re going through, I wonder if you could pray a psalm, or sing a song, to God. Not one that resolves the story, or makes some grand statement of faith and says all the trite things, even if they’re the right things. But one that sings your song, right where you are. Right in the mess, in the betrayal, in the anger, in the darkness, maybe in the face of death itself. That singing is itself a gift and a sign of faith to God, and he receives it as an offering. And may you hear his words back to you, the words also given to Christ from Psalm 22 as he hung on the cross:

He will not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he will not hide his face from you, but hear you when you cry to him. (Psalm 22:24, paraphrase)

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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