When life crushes us, many turn to prayer. But not everyone. Even among the seemingly religious, prayer isn’t the first resort.
The overall secularizing of our culture over the past few hundred years since the Enlightenment has led to something I know all too well: attempts to secure our lives on our own terms and by our own strength.
We don’t even notice our prayerlessness.
We’ve just become so used to gritting out life by our own wits and resources, it doesn’t even register that we haven’t prayed. As a strategic person who thinks through things far too much, this is my problem.
Then there are some who avoid praying for themselves in the middle of their crises because they have a sense that praying for themselves is wrong. If they are to pray, it must be for others. To pray for their own needs is the height of selfishness. But is it?
Anything can inspire prayer.
For many of us, our own situations in life are the starting points for most of our praying. Our own experiences of joy or sorrow or anxiety are often enough to turn us toward God in prayers of thanksgiving or lament or petition. Often, our prayers are brief and we don’t continue on beyond the personal circumstances that launched our praying. We’re not trying to be selfish, we’re just done.
But a mature practice of prayer moves from whatever triggered the praying and extends beyond it. Instead of stopping with herself, a mature person in prayer will use the opportunity to move beyond to others as well.
A person with the flu will pray for health and then pray for the health of others. A person seeking wisdom will pray for it and then for others who need wisdom as well. A person in financial straights will pray for daily bread and then pray for the needs of others.
Our experiences spark a connection in us to others in like circumstances; we join a fellowship of the needy.
We see similar connections all over the place. Get together two people who have travelled to Europe and they can talk for hours of the adventure of travel. Meanwhile, the person listening to their conversation who hasn’t left the state she was born in just won’t get their enthusiasm.
More significantly, a special education teacher loses her ability to use fine motor skills because of a viral infection and tells me, “I know my students in a way I never had till now. I think I’ll do things mostly the same. It’s me who won’t be the same.”
Psalm 102 is a doorway into this expanded form of praying. It soaks in personal suffering for the first 11 verses before taking an unexpected but beautiful hard left turn, sending the prayer into different territory than those first verses let on. But let’s not get ahead of the psalmist. First the immersion in personal circumstance, as the heading of the psalms tells us, in “a prayer of an afflicted person who has grown weak and pours out a lament before the LORD.”
It begins with a petition.
Hear my prayer, LORD;
let my cry for help come to you.
Do not hide your face from me
when I am in distress.
Turn your ear to me;
when I call, answer me quickly (Psalm 102:1-2).
As in most psalms, the personal name of God, Yahweh, is used. By using the Name, the psalmist is drawing on God’s covenant relationship with his people. This is personal. This is an established and secure relationship. Therefore, the psalmist can make claims on God: Hear! Don’t hide! Turn! Answer!
Some shy away from anthropomorphisms which give God human characteristics. But this prayer is no abstraction. It is earth-bound tied to a real and painful experience, using tangible, concrete language as it prays. “Do not hide your face from me” imagines God trying to ignore the psalmist like I do to others when they hurt my feelings. “Turn your ear to me” imagines God changing his posture from aloofness to attentiveness as he turns and gives full focus to the person praying and the thing being prayed about.
This isn’t mere adornment. This is embodied prayer. This is praying in the middle of a living relationship. This is need and distress and a desire for a speedy response expressed with urgency.
Then comes the personal experience itself.
For my days vanish like smoke;
my bones burn like glowing embers.
My heart is blighted and withered like grass;
I forget to eat my food.
In my distress I groan aloud
and am reduced to skin and bones.
I am like a desert owl,
like an owl among the ruins.
I lie awake; I have become
like a bird alone on a roof (Psalm 102:3-7)
Everything is now “I” and “my.” The prayer is personal, revealing, and vulnerable. There is no dressing up and putting on makeup to look good for God. Our most basic prayer is “Here I am.” So, here is the psalmist, fully present to God with rumpled clothing and hair askew.
The psalmist is sick. Physically or metaphorically, it doesn’t matter. Again, we’re faced with earthy realities. His body aches. He can’t eat. He can’t sleep. He’s losing weight. Each day is a waste to time. And he’s desperately lonely.
But don’t do what I just did in that last paragraph, stripping the prayer of its poetry and its physical details. “A bird alone on a roof” speaks so deeply to the loss of community of someone who needs to fly in the flock. “My heart is blighted and withered like grass” conjures images in my mind of apples rotting on the tree and week-old mown grass blown away on a breeze. These images are both imprecise and exact at the same time. Of course, my heart isn’t a blighted apple or withered grass. What does that even mean? And yet, the metaphor captures a spiritual desiccation, a collapse into self as life is sucked away.
Metaphors should fill our prayers, helping us explore our feelings while tying those feelings to the real world, keeping us concrete in a culture majoring in abstraction.
All day long my enemies taunt me;
those who rail against me use my name as a curse.
For I eat ashes as my food
and mingle my drink with tears
because of your great wrath,
for you have taken me up and thrown me aside.
My days are like the evening shadow;
I wither away like grass (Psalm 102:8-11).
As the psalmist dives deeper into his condition, he starts to name not just what’s going on inside of him, but what’s going on outside of him. There are opponents. There are enemies. There are people who use his name as a curse, as a punchline for their jokes.
But the opponents aren’t just human. When we reach verse 10, the psalmist does something most of us find unthinkable. He names God himself as an opponent. His food tastes like ash (or actually is the ash of mourning) and the cup he drinks from is filled with his tears. But that’s because of God’s anger. God has crumpled him up like trash and tossed him in the bin. God has kicked him off the team, fired him. God looked at him, shook his head, and walked away.
How audacious! It takes guts to blame God to his face in prayer. Too many blame God silently, walking away from faith as their way of getting back at the God who failed them. Too many shy away from blaming God, believing any accusation aimed at God is blasphemy and theological suicide. But Psalm 102 isn’t alone in showing us another way. (Psalm 88 is scorching in its accusation of God.)
What these psalms teach us to do is twofold. They teach us honesty, instead of submerging our anger with God. And they teach us engagement, instead of turning our backs on God. This honest engagement keeps the relationship alive and leads to change, particularly personal change arising from self-revelation. When we are honest with God about how we feel about him, we open up ourselves to see ourselves in a new light as well.
It takes 10 verses for the psalmist to express his anger with the God he believes has ditched him out of anger himself. But once it is spoken, it leads to an unexpected change of direction in the psalm-prayer. A wall has broken inside of him and other walls start falling as a result.
Anger expressed, the psalmist now finds himself bending toward worship. But even more than that, he moves from concern about himself to a wider concern for God’s people and for Zion.
But you, LORD, sit enthroned forever;
your renown endures through all generations.
You will arise and have compassion on Zion,
for it is time to show favor to her;
the appointed time has come.
For her stones are dear to your servants;
her very dust moves them to pity.
The nations will fear the name of the LORD,
all the kings of the earth will revere your glory.
For the LORD will rebuild Zion
and appear in his glory.
He will respond to the prayer of the destitute;
he will not despise their plea (Psalm 102: 12-17).
The name Zion refers to the small mountain Jerusalem is built on. Most often the name refers particularly to the temple built at the summit of Mount Zion. Context determines whether the city or the temple is in view. Sometimes, both are in view. Here, the temple may be central, but the whole city is included since both the temple and the city were crushed by the Babylonians.
And it’s to a crushed Zion that the psalmist’s heart reaches out. Having made his personal plea and voiced his disappointment with God in his suffering, he is now able to look beyond himself. And what he sees is the suffering of his fellow people. Zion is a heap of rubble. But even the debris of the temple’s ruin is dear to Yahweh, because it was there that he was worshiped and there that his covenant with Israel was embodied. The temple was a visual reminder to God’s people that he had tied himself to them. As such, even the cracked and crumbled stones of its ruins held significance.
And so the psalmist declares this as the time for the temple to be rebuilt and all Jerusalem with it. If Yahweh is enthroned forever, if his renown endures for all generations, if all nations are to worship him, if all their kings are to bow down before him as the real King, then Zion must be rebuilt. For Yahweh must return to his temple, to his city. His glory will be established when he does. But even more than that, “He will respond to the prayer of the destitute; he will not despise their plea.” Yahweh’s glory is incomplete while the vulnerable are crushed and their prayers unanswered. Therefore, they must and will be heard by him.
And so the psalmist looks forward to when this is accomplished.
Let this be written for a future generation,
that a people not yet created may praise the LORD:
“The LORD looked down from his sanctuary on high,
from heaven he viewed the earth,
to hear the groans of the prisoners
and release those condemned to death.”
So the name of the LORD will be declared in Zion
and his praise in Jerusalem
when the peoples and the kingdoms
assemble to worship the LORD (Psalm 102:18-22).
The psalmist is so convinced God will hear the groaned prayers of the imprisoned and on death row that he writes it down as a prediction. In the future, people will look back and see that it’s been accomplished.
While there are many in our massive prison system who have taken this prayer to heart, there wasn’t a vast network of prisons in the ancient Near East. Prisoners were political prisoners. And considering this psalm was written in the wake of the devastation of Zion by Babylon, the captives would have been Jewish exiles of some sort — priests, royalty, soldiers, administrators, etc. — not convicted criminals. They were God’s people imprisoned for being God’s people.
Their release will result in a fresh round of worship. And part of that praise is the assembling of the nations in Jerusalem to honor Yahweh.
This is an astounding expectation.
Jerusalem is wrecked. The temple is a pile of rocks. People have been hauled off into exile and are imprisoned. On top of this, the psalmist himself is suffering personally. And yet he can imagine those very nations which have caused this trauma (or watched it happen on the sidelines, withholding help) joining God’s people in worship.
The completeness of expression of sorrow and anger to start the psalm has created space for a healed and hopeful vision for the future.
But lest we assume he’s forgotten his current struggles in his rosy vision of what is to come, the psalmist loops back to them and God’s role in causing them.
In the course of my life he broke my strength;
he cut short my days.
So I said:
“Do not take me away, my God, in the midst of my days;
your years go on through all generations.
In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.
They will perish, but you remain;
they will all wear out like a garment.
Like clothing you will change them
and they will be discarded.
But you remain the same,
and your years will never end.
The children of your servants will live in your presence;
their descendants will be established before you” (Psalm 102:23-28).
The psalmist concludes with a reflection in the immortality of Yahweh. The eternal-seeming earth wears out like threadbare t-shirt. And yet Yahweh remains. Endless. Untouched by time.
Because of God’s eternity, the psalmists asks that his few years not be cut off in their middle. “Why would you snip short my years when yours are limitless? Wouldn’t that be an injustice?” he seems to say as he lays out his argument.
He concludes his argument by asserting that future generations of Yahweh’s servants (i.e. those who have remained faithful to him) will live in his presence, established by him and thereby not swept away by adversity. “My children will be among them,” he seems to say, “for you will not let my current sorrows sweep me away.”
What a painful, lovely prayer Psalm 102 is. The honest engagement with God shows both the depth of the psalmist’s sorrow and faith. He can accuse God and yet hope in God at the same time. There is the freedom of a close association and yet there is the worship of one who knows Yahweh is the eternal King of all kings who will be worshiped by the greatest. Why? He is faithful to his covenant and takes care of the lowest.
As such, Psalm 102 calls me to full expression of myself in prayer and to extending beyond myself to pray for others and to worship God even as I wade through a stream of my own tears.