An Analgesic Faith: Reflections on Psalm 77

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash

Lent has recently become my favorite season in the church year. The 40 Lenten days commemorate Jesus' time in the wilderness, where he was tempted both by the devil and the harsh environment. 

Lent is bookended by bleak events: it begins with Ash Wednesday, reminding us that we are but dust (Gen 2:7; 3:19) and ends just before Holy Week, which highlights Jesus’ execution and resurrection. 

In the season of Lent, death is everywhere. 

No wonder Psalm 77 found itself into the lectionary’s daily readings. Verses 2-3 capture the spirit of the psalm and of the season: 

In my day of distress I seek Yhwh;

At night, my arms are stretched out without ceasing

my soul refuses comfort

I think of God and I groan

My spirit meditates and becomes feeble. Selah (my translation)

But the spirit and season of Lent are often far removed from the experiences of many American Christians, and most especially those whose traditions are not structured according to traditional church calendars. 

Too often American Christians as asked to numb their pain. Instead of a faith big enough for this whole human life, broken-hearted people are offered shallow platitudes like “God has a plan” or “God won’t give you more than you can handle,” or “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” so stop asking questions. 

This is an analgesic “faith.” But a faith numb to the world is no faith. It’s a delusion.

If all our faith can do is numb pain, then it’s a faith worth rejecting. Lent is there to remind us of what a durable, trustworthy faith should look and feel like. 

If Christian faith has no room for broken hearts, messy human stories, and scarred bodies then it is precisely the kind of religion that Karl Marx described when he said: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

We must do better. 

“Things Take the Time They Take”

Unlike American culture, Lent doesn’t ask us to hurry up and get over sorrow or to paper over the shocking violence of this world. Lent doesn’t shuffle us along from sorrow to happiness. 

It’s worth remembering that Jesus’ own 40 days in the wilderness evokes the narrative of Israel’s much longer 40-year period in the desert, known especially from the book of Numbers. Jesus relives those years of wandering, adversity, and delay. The season of Lent allows us to experience these narratives according to ritual time.

Lent creates space for us to sit with life’s pain and to feel it fully and collectively. The author of Psalm 77, for instance, does not end in praise or thanksgiving, like other laments. It turns to the memory of God’s actions in the past (see vv. 11-20), but the God of memory never materializes in the present. At the end of it all, the psalmist’s sharp-edged questions still stand: “Will Yhwh reject forever? . . . Has God forgotten to be gracious?” (vv. 7- 9). 

The fact that Lent is a season for the entire church also tells us that we aren't meant to sit in this heaviness alone. 

We aren’t meant to rush through the darkness to get to the light. We can’t speed the night in order to get to morning. You can’t rush your way to Easter. 

When you try to shortcut the journey you never actually leave the driveway.

As Mary Oliver puts it: “things take the time they take”

The Spirit of Lent, the Spirit of Lament

As a church we often fail tender-hearted people. Instead of offering a faith that is spacious enough for all of human life, we hand them a cheap plastic mask and call it, “faith.” 

Doesn’t the world feel so much better when you wear it? Isn’t the world so much happier and sunnier when you choose the blue pill, rather than the red pill? (The Matrix, 1999). Go ahead. Forget reality and live in a dream.

But poet Cleo Wade is correct when she says, “You can either have a mask or a real life. There isn’t a Third Option.”

Lent is a season to recover a real life. It’s a season of self-reflection and of turning away from the things that leach life away. 

If Lent is the season for recovering honesty, psalms of lament (like Psalm 77) give us the language for doing so. Laments are poems in which human beings complain about this world, one another, and of course God. Laments are the human clapback to God, who is often accused of being distant and unresponsive. 

Lent gives us permission to sit in dust and ashes but also to push back against a culture that is so deeply uncomfortable with pain, disruption, loss, and death. 

A Worthy Rebellion

Just because Lent is a season of sorrow, lament, and self-reflection, however, doesn’t mean that it isn’t also a season of hope. 

But Lent teaches us something important about the shape of hope: True hope always has scars. 

That may be the difference between hope and optimism. True hope comes from tilled soil. It springs up out of broken ground. Like all green and growing things, hope takes time. It’s a seed. Seeds begin their lives in darkness.

But hope doesn’t always arrive on our timeline. We don’t get to control when the light arrives. In that way, it’s less like the sun and more like a lightning strike.

Hope also takes honesty. But honesty is hard and painful, because it requires us to look at ourselves and our world through clear, undistorted lenses. We can’t get to the lands of hope and healing without first crossing the bridges of honesty. There are no detours, no shortcuts, and no alternate routes. 

People often give something up during Lent. Instead, I’ll ask you to pick something up--a worthy rebellion: This Lent, don’t settle for an analgesic faith. Insist on a kind of faith that is spacious enough for this entire life—the mess, the joy, the hurt, the injury, and also the recovery.