The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [43]
The psalms are full of shadows—enemies, stark images of betrayal: “Even my friend, in whom I trusted, / who ate my bread, has turned against me” (Ps. 41:9). Psalm 10 contains an image of a lion who “lurks in hiding” (10:9) that calls to my mind the sort of manipulative people whose true colors come out only behind the doors of their “lairs.” Psalm 5 pictures flatterers, “their throat a wide-open grave, all honey their speech” (v. 9). As C. S. Lewis has noted in Reflections on the Psalms, when the psalms speak to us of lying and deceit, “no historical readjustment is required. We are in the world we know.”
But all-American optimism, largely a middle-class and Protestant phenomenon, doesn’t want to know this world. We want to conquer evil by being nice, and nice people don’t want to soil their white gloves with the gritty anger at the heart of a cursing psalm such as 109, in which the psalmist is driven to cry out against his tormentor: “He loved cursing; let curses fall upon him. / He scorned blessing; let blessing pass him by.” The imagery roils like a whirlpool, drawing us in and down: “He put on cursing like his coat; / let it soak into his body like water; / let it sink like oil into his bones . . .” (vv. 17-18).
Evidently in the Hebrew it is clear that this breathtaking catalogue of curses, as one commentary reads, “should be understood as the curses of the psalmist’s enemy against him.” The intent is to show the bully what it’s like to have “no one show any mercy” (v. 12), how it feels to be hated. But the poem also shows us how it feels to hate: its curses are not just a venting of anger but a devastatingly accurate portrait of the psychology of hatred. Though the psalmist starts out speaking of love, of praying for his enemies, he fails, as we tend to do when beset by evil, to keep the love foremost.
The psalmist finally reaches out of this paranoiac maelstrom, saying, “Let the Lord thus repay my accusers” (v. 20) and recalling his own true condition: “I am poor and needy / and my heart is pierced within me” (v. 22). This most painful of psalms ends with a whisper of praise, the plea of an exhausted man for help from a God “who stands at the poor man’s side / to save him from those who condemn him” (v. 31).
It is good to fall back into silence after reading this psalm out loud, to recall that it is a true prayer, in that it leaves ultimate judgment to God. But it also forces us to recognize that calling for God’s judgment can feel dangerously good. It became clear to me in Benedictine liturgy that, as one sister explained, the “enemies” vilified in the cursing psalms are best seen as “my own demons, not ‘enemies out there.’ ” But, she added, noting that the psalms always resist an attempt to use them in a facile manner, “you can’t simply spiritualize all the enemies away.”
Adults can be hypersensitive about admitting to offensive emotions, and children sometimes are more able to allow for the hyperbole of the psalms. I once assigned Psalm 109 in a class I was teaching, and one woman ended up reading it to her nine-year-old granddaughter, after she’d encountered her in tears. It was a hot afternoon, and the girl had ridden her bike over a mile along a dusty trail to the neighborhood swimming pool, hoping to cool off. But she arrived just as the staff was closing it, and one officious youth was short with her. Her grandmother explained that she had to study a poem about being angry, and it might help to read it aloud. But soon after she’d entered the catalogue of curses—“Let their children be wanderers and beggars / driven from the ruins of their home. / Let creditors seize all their goods . . .” (vv. 10-11)—the child cried out, “Oh, stop!