Psalm 44

"Wake up, Lord! Why are you sleeping?"

These lines in the Psalms, calling out the Lord for sleeping on the job, are some of the most startling, daring, and risky in Scripture. The poet cries out to rouse a drowsy God. 

My earliest research in the area of psychology of religion concerned attachment to God, how attachment-related dynamics describe our experiences of God. For example, attachment bonds can be haunted by anxieties rooted in fears about the attachment figure being available to us or abandoning us. When we worry about the availability of the attachment figure we might grow excessively clingy or needy. We might become jealous and never want them to leave our sight. We might grow angry when the attachment figure isn't as responsive or attentive as we'd like. 

Attachment anxiety is one way to frame the lament of Psalm 44. For example, in a scale my colleague Angie MacDonald and I created called the Attachment to God Inventory (a widely used instrument that has been translated in to numerous languages) we ask questions to assess various symptoms of attachment anxiety:

Angry protest: Getting angry if the attachment figure is not as responsive as we wish they would be.

Example AGI item: “I often feel angry with God for not responding to me when I want.”

Preoccupation with relationship: Worry, rumination, or obsession with the status of the relationship.

Example AGI item: “I worry a lot about my relationship with God.”

Fear of abandonment: Fear that the attachment figure will leave or reject you.
Example AGI item: “I fear God does not accept me when I do wrong.”

Anxiety over lovability: Concerns that you are either not loved or are unlovable.
Example AGI item: “I crave reassurance from God that God loves me.”

Jealousy: Concerns that the attachment figure prefers others over you.
Example AGI item: “I am jealous at how God seems to care more for others than for me."

Again, we could frame the lament of Psalm 44 as an expression of attachment anxiety. And yet, I've come to think that attachment theory isn't the best model for thinking about lament in the Psalms.

Specifically, I'm uncomfortable framing the lament of Psalm 44 as pathological, as an expression of relational dysfunction To be sure, there is angry protest, fear of abandonment, and anxiety over lovability in the lament of Psalm 44. But these fears are real and legitimate complaints, rather than expressions of an insecure attachment. 

Because of these concerns, framing lament as pathological, in 2007 I published my Summer versus Winter Christian model of religious experience. In this model, lament isn't framed as dysfunction but is, rather, a normal and expected experience of faith. In that article I quote Walter Brueggemann's assessment from his book The Message of the Psalms:

It is a curious fact that the church has, by and large, continued to sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented…It is my judgment that this action of the church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life. The reason for such relentless affirmation of orientation seems to me, not from faith, but from the wishful optimism of our culture. Such a denial and cover-up, which I take it to be, is an odd inclination for passionate Bible users, given the larger number of psalms that are songs of lament, protest, and complaint about an incoherence that is experienced in the world…I believe that serous religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God’s “loss of control.”

Again, we are tempted to think that lament is pathological, that "acknowledgement of negativity" in our relationship with God, like the angry protest of Psalm 44, is an act of "unfaith." But as Brueggemann goes on to say:

The point to be urged here is this: The use of these “psalms of darkness” may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith…

That is the jolt of Psalm 44, how crying "Wake up!" to God is a daring expression of bold faith.