DET HINSIDES I VOR MIDTE
© Peter G. van Breemen SJ
THE BEYOND IN OUR MIDST (Psalm 139)
Yahweh, you examine me and know me,
you know when I sit, when I rise,
you understand my thoughts from afar.
You watch when I walk or lie down,
you know every detail of my conduct.
A word is not yet on my tongue before you,
Yahweh, know all about it.
You fence me in, behind and in front,
you have laid your hand upon me.
Such amazing knowledge is beyond me,
a height to which I cannot attain. (Psalm 139: 1-6, The New Jerusalem Bible)
Yahweh really knows me. What does this mean? When we talk about knowing another person, it is very often a superficial knowledge. We tend to box people into categories: he is conservative or liberal; he is profound or shallow; he is frustrated and bitter or joyous and full of hope. After having attached enough labels to the person we glibly say we know every-thing about him. In fact, we haven't touched the heart of the person. The psalmist says that God really knows me as I am, without labels, without categories. The New Catechism expresses it well: “After all, my parents could not have wanted ‘me.’ At best, they wanted ‘a boy’ or ‘a girl.’ Only God wanted ‘me.’ ” [A New Catechism: Catholic Faith for Adults, trans. Kevin Smyth (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), 382] The word "name" in the Hebrew language means that which makes a person unique.
When the Hebrew claims to know the name of a person, in effect he is saying, “I know this person as a husband knows his wife.” We can never know the name of a person unless we really love him. And the fact that God knows my name implies that he loves me:
Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by your name, you are mine.
Since I regard you as precious,
since you are honoured and I love you (Is 43: 1.4, NJB)
There are more than seven billion people in this world and yet no two of them are identical. There is no mass production with God. Though every person is different, God can put himself in each one without repeating himself. That is the richness of God. Every human being is a prototype—the first and last of a series. God is involved in each of us. He has set him-self in the hearts of each one of us. St. Augustine exclaims:
Late have I loved You, 0 beauty so ancient and so new! Late have I loved You. Behold You were ever within me, and I abroad, seeking You there. I … rushed madly about in the midst of forms beautiful which You had made. You were ever with me, but I was not with You. The very things which had not been, unless they were in You, kept me from You. You called me by name, You cried aloud to me, and Your voice pierced my deafness. (The Confessions, Book X, Chapter 27)
He had looked everywhere for God and God was so close—in the midst of his own heart. St. Paul tells us, “and indeed he is not far from any of us, since it is in him that we live, and move, and exist,” (Acts 17:27- 28, NJB).
That I can be myself is due to God, for he is the source of my being. When I run away or break faith with him, I am no longer me: “Far away from you life is not life. To break faith with you is to be no one” [Hub Oosterhuis et al., Fifty Psalms: An Attempt at a New Translation (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 74]. From whom or what do I run? The problem is not God—“God is closer to me than I am to myself” (St. Augustine)—nor is the tension between God and myself. The cleavage is within me. I am inclined to consider God as a threat, as someone who has set out to de-plume or strip me. But these are false concepts. God is the source of life. He wants me to live and to grow and to come to fulfillment. The threat is me-myself. Often I betray myself. Like St. Paul “I do not understand my own behaviour; I do not act as I mean to, but I do things that I hate.” (Rom 7:15, NJB). In all these moments God is always on the side of my true self but I am not! He is faithful. He is closer to me than I am to myself. Bonhoeffer calls God “the Beyond in our midst” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison Edit. By Eberhard Bethge). I can never fathom the mystery of my own personality: “(That’s) the paradoxical character of every prayer, of speaking to somebody to whom you cannot speak because he is not ‘somebody,’ of asking somebody of whom you cannot ask anything because he gives or gives not before you ask, of saying ‘Thou’ to somebody who is nearer to the I than the I is to itself” [Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 187]. God is more immanent in me than I am in myself. And that “more,” that surplus of immanence, is his transcendence. That he is more faithful, that he is closer to me than I am to myself is the divine, the transcendence of God. It proves that he is greater than I. I must adore him. Rather than a threat he is the one guarantee that I can be myself.
Where shall I go to escape your spirit?
Where shall I flee from your presence?
If I scale the heavens you are there,
if I lie flat in Sheol, there you are.
If I speed away on the wings of the dawn,
if I dwell beyond the ocean,
even there your hand will be guiding me,
your right hand holding me fast.
I will say, 'Let the darkness cover me,
and the night wrap itself around me,'
even darkness to you is not dark,
and night is as clear as the day. (Ps 139, 7-12, NJB)
We cannot hide or run away from God. If “If I speed away on the wings of the dawn” (v. 9), God is still there. Sometimes the presence of God is expressed as something frightening, for instance, in the Book of Job: “What is man that you should make so much of him, subjecting him to your scrutiny, that morning after morning you should examine him and at every instant test him? Will you never take your eyes off me long enough for me to swallow my spittle?” (Job 7:17-19). Job feels watched by God all the time and this upsets him. This describes a period of desolation and confusion in Job’s life. In the latter part of the book he returns to his true faith and consolation. The psalmist speaks about God as he really is. That the presence of God is all-embracing does not scare him. It makes him secure: “Wherever I go God is there.” This psalm was frequently used in catechetics as a threatening measure. The image of God is symbolized in the ever-watchful eye with the warning finger in front of it. Such a distortion and at what price!
Sartre writes in his autobiography, Les Mots, of a boyhood experience which bore in seed incalculable consequences. In the midst of an innocent prank he suddenly realized “God sees me.” This so frightened him that at the very same moment he made a deliberate choice. He cursed God. In later years he admitted that without this misunderstanding he and God could have gotten along all right. God was used as a stop-gap. Where the education fell short, where parents and teachers could not reach the boy, God was used as a prolongation of education. That is unbiblical, and we see the disastrous results in a man like Sartre. The true God is the source of life, and when the presence of God is expressed as all-embracing, it is meant to be a source of joy. We feel secure because no matter what we do the hand of God has hold of us. That's the way Jesus lived his life. He saw the Father everywhere not as an overseer but as Father—one who loves and provides for his needs:
That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it. Surely life means more than food, and the body more than clothing. Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they are? Can any of you, for all his worrying, add one single cubit to his span of life? And why worry about clothing? Think of the flowers growing in the fields; they never have to work or spin; yet I assure you that not even Solomon in all his regalia was robed like one of these. Now if that is how God clothes the grass in the field which is there today and thrown_ into the furnace tomorrow, will he not much more look after you, you men of little faith? (Matt 6: 25-31).
The presence of God removes the presence of worries in my life. It doesn't frighten me, but it gives me peace, that safe feeling which goes with true faith.
It was you who created my inmost self,
and put me together in my mother’s womb;
for all these mysteries I thank you:
for the wonder of myself, for the wonder of your works.
You know me through and through,
from having watched my bones take shape
when I was being formed in secret,
knitted together in the limbo of the womb.
You had scrutinised my every action,
all were recorded in your book,
my days listed and determined,
even before the first of them occurred.
God, how hard it is to grasp your thoughts!
How impossible to count them!
I could no more count them than I could the sand,
and suppose I could, you would still be with me (v. 13-18).
The providential care of God is strikingly realized in the miracle of every birth. Each newborn infant demonstrates the tremendous care and attention which God has for each of us. “He put me together” the psalmist exclaims! That I am who I am is due to God. His knowledge is creative. God does not know me because I am, but I am because he knows me. In terms of love (which in God is identical with knowledge) St. Augustine expresses this same truth: “By loving us, God makes us lovable.” All of this loving and creative knowledge is a present reality. God knows and loves right now—this very moment. God as the deepest Ground of my being is not a static reality, something dead but rather a dynamic and an ever life-giving activity.
This is the mystery I carry within myself. This is the wonder of myself! Scripture does not disregard the worth of myself. On the contrary there is a tremendous esteem for the dignity of man in the Christian revelation. Each of us can join Mary when she sings: “the Almighty has done great things for me” (Lk 1:49). It is good to praise God for what he has accomplished in me. In this prayer of praise my relationship with God is deepened and a sense for the mystery (the “musterion” as the early Church called it) grows. Such an attitude of faith will little by little shape my outlook and my behavior. A prayer life which neglects this sense of wonder becomes more easily stifled and tasteless than the biblical approach of the psalmist: “Bless Yahweh my soul and remember all his kindnesses” (Ps 103:2). The true esteem of man for himself implies the recognition of a dependence on God: the great things have been done to me. The very real dignity of my being myself is a dignity which has been received. This is not to make it less valuable. To be sure this awareness of the divine origin makes it all the more precious and reliable. There is a deep peace in this dependence which the world could never give.
God, If only you would kill the wicked!
Men of blood, away from me!
They talk blasphemously about you,
regard your thoughts as nothing.
Yahweh, do I not hate those who hate you,
and loathe those who defy you?
I hate them with a total hatred,
I regard them as my own enemies.
God, examine me and know my heart,
probe me and know my thoughts;
make sure I do not follow pernicious ways,
and guide me in the way that is everlasting (v. 19-24).
There is a danger of a false autonomy, of cutting myself off from my roots. Something in each of us rebels against the divine mystery by promising “You will be like gods” (Gen. 3:5). Though God is closer to me than my own self, there is still the perilous possibility of running away from God at the cost of running away from my true self. In the first part of the psalm I relished the truth that God goes with me on all my ways and paths. Now I have to admit that often for all practical purposes I deny this. Earlier I sang with the psalmist of God's wondrous knowledge of my thoughts and deeds and now I realize that he knows, too, the gap that exists between the two. Unconsciously, perhaps, but very really I am my own god not so much in theory as in practice. For as soon as God is no longer the all-important one in my life, he becomes unimportant. To give God the second place would mean to give him no place at all. I am tempted to serve two lords and even to compromise God's position in my life with someone or something else. This is enough to deny him. Idols are not a phenomena of a past era and a primitive culture. We also have idols not of carved wood but in the form of the “in” thing which is just as compelling and evocative. It is not for nothing that John ends his first letter which reads so eloquently of God’s love for us and our love for each other: “Children, be on your guard against false gods” (1 Jn 5:21). Idolatry causes sterility and suffering to myself and to others.
It is a basic untruthfulness. It is a denial of that infinite depth my life contains. And while I can never fully comprehend the mystery which is my life, through the gift of revelation I accept “the Beyond in our midst.” At the end of this magnificent psalm, the psalmist says he is afraid—not afraid of God but afraid of himself and of the possibility which he discovers in himself to ruin the mystery of God in himself and in this world. Humbly and confidently he prays: “Make sure I do not follow pernicious ways, and guide me in the way that is everlasting.”