How long will You hide Your face?

Ps. 13:2

We try to focus on the festive. But what we do with our despair?

Again the poet looks up and shrugs - nobody is watching, the divine face is looking away - if there’s even anybody home at all..

The struggle to find a seed of hope within our private and public suffering continues to challenge us on this and during these difficult days. It’s been this way for such a long time.

Poets and composers keep coming up to this theme as a way to lean into the losses and find paths that lift up life’s surprising way of somehow, sometimes — turning the corner. 

For this poet, it begins, again,  with doubt: 

עַד־אָ֣נָה יְ֭הֹוָה תִּשְׁכָּחֵ֣נִי נֶ֑צַח עַד־אָ֓נָה ׀ תַּסְתִּ֖יר אֶת־פָּנֶ֣יךָ מִמֶּֽנִּי׃

How long, O ETERNAL One; will You ignore me forever?

How long will You hide Your face from me?

Ps. 13:2

The trope of ‘God’s hidden face’ repeats through the scriptures and keeps coming back through history. It is what started the entire Exodus narrative going and on this Passover what many of us feel and sense -- the gap between the wistful narratives of liberation and how far we really are from that. 

The technology of nonstop surveillance does nothing to combat the terror of theological emptiness in the face of suffering  - whether very public or very personal pain. How do we face the faceless sky?

Ezra Butler writes quite powerfully and painfully about this chapter and what it means to face tough truths, and keep on trying to talk to the voices in our heads that shut us down: 

“Loneliness, depression: psalm 13 is about battling your own demons. About the bargaining that you do when you are in that pit of mental despair and existential anguish. About the voices in your head telling you that you are worthless, that you are incapable, that you are nothing. Those are the enemies and oppressors the psalm is referring to.

It is written that people are created in the image of God, but when you are in that lonely, dark place, you can’t see that face when you look in the mirror. You don’t feel the essence of God within yourself. You see nothing. You feel nothing. You are obsessed with how others must see you, convinced they are cheering your demise. Convinced you are the center of their attention, that they are wishing for you to fail, hoping for you to die.

You pray for light. You pray for the ability to see yourself as the image of god again. You pray for the day you can be glad again, you pray for the day you will want to sing again. You say the words without believing them possible. You say the words because maybe that will change something. Maybe the uttering of the words are able to will them into being. 

Maybe uttering the words will silence the voices in your head. 

You pray for kindness. You pray to be seen. You pray for someone to see you for who you are. For what you are. For someone to accept you. And if someone does that act of kindness for you, and sees the image of God in you, the enemies and the oppressors you are battling would simply disappear and be forever vanquished.”

Butler’s words echo for me, as, along with many, I am struggling to find the path that leads, step by step, towards a better day.

Sometimes the words will help, sometimes it’s music. 

For Johannes Brahms, the German composer, it was both. 

As a holiday treat, enjoy his Psalms 13 for a women’s chorus and organ (The girls' choir at Freiburg Minster / July 2008 )

Notice how Brahms, like the Psalmist, begins low and takes us higher, from faces averted to faces uplifted.

Again and again, whatever it takes, we try to face each other with kindness, sing together, turn to hope.

Image: Johannes Brahms

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