O search me, God, and know my heart,
test me and know my thoughts.
See that I follow not the wrong path
and lead me in the path of life eternal.
This extraordinary Psalm ends on
the most personal and moving note. Search
me, O God, know my heart… It is an echo of the very first words of the
Psalm, as you may have noticed: Lord, you have searched me and known me…
The same Hebrew verb[1]
sits at both ends of the Psalm. It is
translated “search”, but the word means literally to penetrate, or in today’s
media jargon, to “get to the bottom of…”
Now at the end he says: O search me, God, and know my heart, test me
and know my thoughts.
There are two
things here, in this simple, four-line conclusion to the Psalm. The first is just that, his eager openness to
God. It is the opposite of much religion,
in which we learn to be cautious… God might not be pleased with us… God needs
to be propitiated, persuaded… Contemplative
life and prayer by contrast teaches instead a mutual welcome and hospitality… abide
in me and I in you, as Jesus put it.
But more than that… as Richard Rohr and other great teachers keep
insisting, in the silence and stillness we are starting to glimpse a unity of
all things… it is less and less a matter of God out there and us here, or
dividing life into us and them, shielding ourselves with categories and labels. The reality the contemplative comes to see,
even far in the distance, is the unity in which the Creator is holding all
things in love. And so there is actually
only one prayer in the universe – Jesus’s great prayer of love and unity. And when we pray, however we are praying, we
are joining this one prayer of love and healing:
I ask not
only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me
through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may
they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent
me. The glory that you have given me I have given
them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me,
that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have
sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.[2]
And the
second thing is how the Psalmist sees life as a journey, a pilgrimage – at any
rate, moving on, most decidedly not staying the same: See that I follow not the wrong path, and
lead me… In Robert Frost’s words:
I shall be
telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
We are on the road less travelled. Faith turns out to be, not so much finding
the right things and believing them, as moving on, opening to change, growing
up.* It is the road less travelled
because people look more for security and safety, understandably. Change is the enemy. And right there is one of our best paradoxes –
as we read in another great Psalm[3]: My safety comes from the Lord, who made
heaven and earth… The ego recedes to
its proper place in our lives – and indeed you can read Psalm 139 entirely as
the song of someone no longer ego-driven, whose true self has come to rebirth –
we are not living in fear. We have
valid, sometimes very urgent concerns, of course, and reasons for caution, but
the faith depicted in this Psalm is our silently-breathed Yes to God, in life
and in death.
Miles Coverdale (1535):
Trye me (o God) and seke the
grounde of myne hert: proue me, & examen my thoughtes. Loke well, yf
there be eny waye of wickednesse in me, & lede me in the waye euerlastinge.
* It is not
all “moving on”. Abraham, the biblical
archetype of faith, eventually reached a place to live. Any pilgrim needs a turangawaewae, a
“place to stand”, where some necessary things are decided. The Psalmists recognise this, and it is
reflected for instance in Psalm 112:7 – He shall not fear, his heart is
firm, he trusts in the Lord. (And in
Psalms 57:7 and 108:1) The KJV renders “firm”
as “fixed”, and the NRSV as “steadfast”.
The Hebrew word kūn (כּוּן) denotes
stable, enduring. It is the still part
of us approached in silence and trust – it is not any clinging to “what I
always thought”, or any preconception or prejudice.
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