Psalms 9-11

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POST III OF LX

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The Book of Common Prayer (1979) includes a plan for reading the Book of Psalms in morning and evening installments for 30 days.  I am therefore blogging through the Psalms in 60 posts.

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Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning:

Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them,

that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life,

which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ;

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

—The Book of Common Prayer (1979), page 226

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Psalms 9, 10, and 11, taken together, cover a wide range of emotional and spiritual territory.  Psalm 9, a lament, contains conditional thanksgiving; the Psalmist makes gratitude to God contingent upon God fighting his enemies.  The author of Psalm 10 wonders why the arrogant oppressors have free rein and God stands distant from human troubles.  There is no thanksgiving, conditional or otherwise.  In Psalm 11 the Psalmist trusts in God unconditionally.

Unquestioning faith in God is not my style.  Yes, I trust in God most of the time.  During those times I still harbor doubts and questions.  I identify with the authors of Psalms 9, 10, and 11 at different times of my life.  I, as an intellectually honest monotheist, lack the luxury of dualism, whereby I thank one deity for all the good and blame another figure for all the evil.  God is, to borrow an expression, in the dock.  This is the theological problem of God and evil, with which great thinkers and lesser philosophers have struggled for thousands of years.

I am not so vain as to classify myself as a great thinker; St. Thomas Aquinas I am not.  I do  pass along one germane conclusion, however:  We human beings live in the territory bounded by divine grace and providence on one frontier and our free will on the other.  In this context we have many excellent and difficult questions for God.  May we dare to ask them faithfully and honestly–sometimes even angrily.  Do we imagine that, if we do, we are keeping any secrets from God?

KENNETH RANDOLPH TAYLOR

JULY 31, 2017 COMMON ERA

THE FEAST OF SAINT IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA, FOUNDER OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS

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