We tend to think of the Psalms as spiritually focused in content. Just last week we were talking about seeing and longing for God. But a lot of the distress in the Psalms is interpersonal in nature. The drama is human drama.
When I was just out of graduate school I worked for four years in an inpatient psychiatric facility. Some of my time was spent with patients struggling with addiction. They would come in, stay a few weeks, get clean and sober, and then head back out into the world. Then the real test began.
And that test was mainly relational and social. Yes, the addiction itself would beckon and tempt, but the social grooves of addiction, the relational patterns, were the biggest predictors of relapse. Friendships and social connections had been formed around the addiction. These were your people, your friends. People you cared about, shared memories with, and liked. Even loved. It's one thing to stop taking a drug, quite another to wholly separate from a network of friends and social connections. And yet, stepping back into these relationships would inevitably lead to relapse.
Of course, the social nature of addiction isn't exactly what Psalm 64 is talking about. I'm mainly sharing it as an illustration about how much of the moral drama in our lives is relational drama. Where the human drama of addiction is more enabling and co-dependent, the relationships in Psalm 64 are more hostile and antagonistic:
God, hear my voice when I am in anguish.
Protect my life from the terror of the enemy.
Hide me from the scheming of wicked people,
from the mob of evildoers,
who sharpen their tongues like swords
and aim bitter words like arrows,
shooting from concealed places at the blameless.
From children being bullied at school to workplace harassment to domestic abuse to persecuted communities to social marginalization to online doxxing to prejudice, there is a long history of pain here. We find ourselves surrounded by cruelty.
Some of this can seem like small potatoes. But facing consistent hostility, even on a small scale, can rob life of joy. People have committed suicide over it. I'm put in mind, from Samuel 1, of Hannah's despair in the face of Peninnah's persistent taunting. The scope of the drama is domestic and intimate, involving only two people, but the hostility of this one person ruins Hannah's life. It doesn't require a mob. A single mean person can do the trick.
All that to say, let's not over-spiritualize the Psalms. Yes, there are a lot of Sunday morning praise songs in the collection. But its prayers for help frequently emerge in the midst of daily life, in the middle of the human drama. Like Hannah, in those small spaces of hurt and pain, we cry out to the Lord.
