Where can I go from your spirit, or
where can I flee from your face?
If I climb the heavens, you are
there. If I lie in the grave, you are
there.
If I take the wings of the dawn and
dwell at the sea’s furthest end,
even there your hand would lead me,
your right hand hold me fast.
If I say, “Let the darkness hide me and the light around me be night,”
even darkness is not dark for you and the night is clear as the day.
The Psalmist is not complaining. He feels he has grown up. He is celebrating that there is no hiding
place from God – not in atheism, not in a charmed life in which everything goes
right and you have no need of God, not in Auschwitz nor in the deepest, most
rigorous rejection of God because of all that’s wrong in the world, not in all
the many pathways of self-indulgence… No
concealment, no hiding place, sings this Hebrew poet… If I lie in the grave,
you are there… darkness is not dark for you, the night is clear as the
day… nowhere he can run to.
In preparing this, I thought initially
that it would be fun to be the first in living memory to comment on this
passage of Psalm 139 without mentioning Francis Thompson’s poem, The Hound
of Heaven. But then it dawned on me
that there are actually two English poets, contemporaries in the Victorian era,
each of whom died young, and each of whom suffered most of his life with
tuberculosis. But in their poems they depict
radically different attitudes to God.
The other poet is William Ernest Henley.
He had bone tuberculosis, and had a leg amputated.[1] Henley’s choice is implacable defiance of
God, and so, his poem Invictus:s
Out of
the night that covers me,
Black
as the pit from pole to pole,
I
thank whatever gods may be
For
my unconquerable soul.
In the
fell clutch of circumstance
I
have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under
the bludgeonings of chance
My
head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond
this place of wrath and tears
Looms
but the Horror of the shade,
And
yet the menace of the years
Finds
and shall find me unafraid.
It
matters not how strait the gate,
How
charged with punishments the scroll,
I am
the master of my fate,
I
am the captain of my soul.
Francis
Thompson on the other hand, after years of living on the streets, battling TB, opium
addiction, multiple suicide attempts, finally understands the need to stop running. The Hound of Heaven, he writes, is loping in
a leisurely manner, patiently, lovingly, after him. In trying to outrun or to evade God, or ignore
God, it is love he is driving away – I am he whom thou seekest:
Ah,
fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.
The Psalmist also: If I say,
“Let the darkness hide me and the light around me be night,” even darkness is
not dark for you and the night is clear as the day. It might be the darkness of addiction…
not necessarily to alcohol or other addictive drugs… it could be needing to be
entertained all the time, fear of boredom, a chronic need of action and noise
and excitement… it could be captivity to some aberrant religion or sect… or
hopelessly dysfunctional family… it could be submission to despair, or
captivity to depression… Whatever it is,
the Psalmist’s discovery is, I am seen… the darkness is not dark for you and
the night is clear as the day.
I can stop running. I can be still. I can learn to wait. I can start to listen.
Miles Coverdale (1535):
Whither
shal I go then from thy sprete? Or, whither shal I fle from thy presence?
Yf
I clymme vp in to heauen, thou art there: yf I go downe to hell, thou art there
also.
Yf
I take the wynges of the mornynge, & remayne in the vttemost parte of the see:
Euen
there also shal thy honde lede me, and thy right hande shal holde me.
Yf
I saye: peradueture the darcknesse shal couer me, then shal my night be turned
to daye.
Yee
the darcknesse is no darcknesse with the, but the night is as cleare as the
daye, the darcknesse & light are both alike.
[1]
That was one reason Robert Louis Stevenson saw him as a model for Long John
Silver. Henley’s daughter died at the
age of five, and she was J M Barrie’s model for Wendy in Peter Pan.
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