Stop looking at me

prayer from the edge of oblivion.

It’s a classic complaint from childhood: “Stop looking at me!” But from a man of faith to the God of his life? That’s disturbing. Yet it’s where we find David in the closing words of Psalm 39.

He begins by recounting having been “in the presence of the wicked”. In their company he remained silent, until he could do so no longer. He meditated, “the fire burned,” and he spoke. But far from being a speech of condemnation, he prays the Lord would show him his life’s end and the number of his days. This is distinctly Psalm 90 territory.

He follows the recognition of his transience with a plea to be rescued from his transgressions. They have been the source of his silence, as he has borne the Lord’s rebuke and discipline. He’s praying as one who feels himself to be “a foreigner, a stranger” with God, just as his ancestors were. There is a mismatch here and there always has been. But that burgeoning sense of dislocation finally goes to a place we scarcely expect a man like David to go:

Look away from me,
that I may enjoy life again
before I depart and am no more.

We’re so used to the voice in the psalms begging God for help, asking for his presence and intervention, that this plea is deeply troubling. Is this the dissolution of a decades-long dependence upon and delight in the LORD? Just what are we meant to do with these words?

One thing we might be glad to do is recognise the very next psalm speaks far more confidently. Much as the desolation of Psalm 88 is followed by the definitive confidence of Psalm 89, so Psalm 40 finds David speaking of being set upon a rock, safe and secure, with praise on his lips. His concluding prayer there is that far from turning from him, the Lord would “think of me.”

It’s good to know the end of Psalm 39 is not the end of the story. But in a sense that’s a move we might make too quickly, in our discomfort with disquieting emotions. And that would be a denial of the purpose for which the Lord has placed such psalms and such statements in the Bible.

You don’t need to be perverse to want to linger in the storm a little longer.¹ Life with the Lord can at times be far from straightforward. There are depths in God and in the life of faith that may often feel deeply disturbing. We cannot say we know every inch of the ‘terrain’ that is the God of the covenant. He is, after all, the one who said to Moses, “I am that I am/I will be who I will be.”

Those for whom faith can only ever mean an untroubled life, if it’s to be genuine, can find these words an unwelcome surprise. And yet there is much to be gained from allowing the reality of David’s agony to address us. Andy Squyres has recently explored the paradoxes inherent in relationship with the living God in his song, Sing Your Glory:

Years pass like flowers they’re fading
Dam breaks a river is raging
It’s a complicated story
But I sing your glory
I walk on the edge of a razor
In the hands of a complicated Saviour
Harmonise with the earth below me
I sing your glory

A complicated story and a complicated Saviour? Does that almost sound impious? Not from the last lines of Psalm 39 it doesn’t. The complications, of course, are not because he is mutable, changeable, irascible. They have their seat in who and what we are in sin, in our creaturely finitude, and in the unapproachable light we are nevertheless called to approach.

It’s in that fragile state David asks to be left alone, for the pressure to be lifted, for the gaze of the Lord to no longer search him. In this tattered condition, David wants a life less exposed, less examined by the one who is all-seeing.

Yet this dark-room negative of Psalm 139 isn’t treason, nor is it apostasy. It’s a plea for relief, for space. The warfare has been unending. The contradiction between the gloriously holy character of God and the sin and wickedness David sees around and feels within is almost too much to bear. He needs some R&R away from the field of battle and from under the gaze of his commanding officer.

If you know, you know.

And if you know, you won’t condemn David, nor any of your brothers or sisters who might feel just the same but are too frightened to acknowledge it, even to their best of friends. Some people can’t handle that level of vulnerability being shared with them; it feels like the abject failure of faith and they don’t know what to do with it.

Yet these statements are made from within the life of faith. David is not asking the Lord to go away but to look away. Those are very different in tone and in intent. The fact is, this level of disquiet tends to be companion to the most intense awareness of the beauty of God. The brighter the light, the denser the shadow.

Does David really believe his life will end in the oblivion of “no more”? Of course, it takes the whole Bible to parse the full reality of hope and we’re in the middle of that unfolding story in this psalm. Yet even for those who are privileged to live in the light of Jesus’ resurrection, these wounds are not to be treated lightly, nor healed superficially.

Far from trying to explain away in barely-disguised embarrassment David’s words, we ought to recognize he is doing something remarkably brave and generous: giving us a means to confront and to voice our own experience of the LORD’s gaze as a stressor and not only as solace and security. He is articulating, without false resolution, what may be unspoken for many.

And we can thankful he does so with an honesty so searing it can disarm our defences. Such honesty could only be finally destabilising and destructive if God were not God. Yet he is and ever will be. Our Lord Jesus went to the outer reaches of all darkness so we might not be terrified to express to him the confusions we carry, even as we stumble forward in the light of his life.

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“I sing glory with no answer to the question
I sing glory like an agitated freshman
I don’t care if you show up or ignore me
I sing your glory…”

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1. That perversity is explored by Mary Chapin Carpenter in her song, Shelter of Storms.