For a few days I have been contemplating some of the verses in the Psalms that use the rock metaphor. What is God like? Ask the Psalmist poet that question and there's a rich cluster of metaphors scattered throughout that remarkable collection of praise and lament, thanksgiving and complaint, exultation and despair, joy and sorrow, trust and fear, peace and terror, prayer and soliloquy, that we call the Book of Psalms.
One of those metaphors "God is my rock" occurs 28 times. Variously translated rock, cliff, crag, it is an image of permanence, of that which has always been present, of solid 'thereness' whatever the weather prevailing in our inner climate. So I preached on that metaphor this morning. And in my reflection and exposition, which was more exploration than explanation, I used one of Denise Levertov's poems, which displays a sure-footedness as impressive as any mountain goat leaping confidently across the rocks, crags and cliff faces. Here's the poem:
"Suspended".
I had grasped God's garment in the void
But my hand slipped
On the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
Must have upheld my leaden weight
From falling, even so,
For though I claw at empty air and feel
Nothing, no embrace, I have not plummeted.
For all the confidence inspired by that metaphor, "You are my rock", for many people of faith, life still has periods of vulnerability, times of brokenness, and inner struggle, sometimes prolonged, that comes from not being able to feel, and experience the reality to which the metaphor points. Levertov's own faith journey, and her life experiences of hurt and loss, of illness and anxiety are the human loam out of which poems like this grow. She knows those feelings we often find it hard to acknowledge, and harder still to name.
Just when we need God most it doesn't feel as if God hears the cry of the heart, or comforts our anxiety-driven longings, or changes the circumstances that threaten to overwhelm. The absence, silence and 'not thereness' of God is sometimes a compelling contradiction of our trust and faith and hope. I know of no poem that articulates better this ambiguity touched by trust, or which gives testimony with such honest hopefulness laced with threads of uncertainty. It is a succinct credo of gentle defiance. Those last four words, "I have not plummeted", carry the precious freight of spiritual wisdom borne out of suffering, and survival, and gratitude for both.
And maybe, just maybe, David's use of the image sometimes betrays his own need not only to state his confidence, but to overstate it in cumulative images, as if to persuade his own heart that it is so. Is that what he is doing in Psalm 18.2? "The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold."
There is practical sense and theological wisdom in spitting words of faith and hope into the very wind of adversity. The man who wrote those words, assuming for the moment it was David, had scars of body and psyche, from being hounded and hunted by Saul, and escaping only by accidents of history and coincidences of circumstance; except for the poet psalmist, such accidents and coincidences had their origin not in chance and fortune, but in that mysterious purposefulness that intervenes when we least expect it. And the result is, for all the crisis and threat of life itself, "You are my rock...I have not plummeted."
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