But I trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord
because he has dealt bountifully with me.
(Psalm 13:5-6, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
How long, O Lord?
That question weighs heavily on the mind of the 13th Psalm’s author, identified by an introductory header as King David himself. We can’t point to a specific incident that inspired this lament, but knowing David’s life story as we do we can well imagine moments when the one-time golden boy, chosen by God to serve as Israel’s champion, must have wondered if the Lord had abandoned him.
“How long will you hide your face from me?” David asks the Lord. “How long must I bear pain in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” (13:1-2) I think the first Quakers, especially the ones who had been publicly tortured or thrown into prison by the British government, could relate to his anguish. Yet… I won’t say their faith never wavered; I suspect for some Friends, at some low points, despair and doubt did gain an upper hand. But we hear, over and over, of those whose convictions remained firm despite their suffering.
What kept those Friends connected to their ministry?
In 1653, James Nayler was arrested and jailed on charges of blasphemy. Another Quaker, Francis Howgill, came to testify on Nayler’s behalf, but his refusal to take off his hat in deference to the court landed him in jail as well. Soon after, the two of them received a letter from Margaret Fell. Fell had become a convinced Friend just the year before, after hosting the traveling minister George Fox at her home, but had already begun to become a crucial source of logistical and moral support to Friends as they came together in their Religious Society.
“Look not at briars nor look not at all the thorns, nor at the mountains, nor the coldness,” Fell advised her comrades:
“…for well it may be so for there has been no vinedresser nor no ploughman there, none to dress the ground, no seedsman to sow the seed, and therefore the lord has set you forth to do his work, and the ploughman shall not plough in vain nor the seedsman shall not sow in vain.”
Early Friends such as Fell saw their seventeenth-century world as a deeply corrupted place, where “darkness” and “heathenish ministry” held sway. But “now God has raised up [God’s] glorious light,” she assured Nayler and Howgill, and they should continue to “stand in the will of God being guided by that which is eternal unto God.”
Turning our attention back to the psalm, “that which is eternal unto God” undoubtedly includes what David, as he comes out of his funk, calls God’s “steadfast love.” We’ve encountered this attribute of God before; the Hebrew word hesed encompasses many qualities, from “loyalty” and “trust” to “mercy” and “lovingkindness.”
Hesed remains available to us, as we face our own darkness.
I’ve been spending some time with the recently published first volume of The Psalms: A Sanctuary for the Soul, an interpretive guidebook by the relational theologian Marty Folsom. Folsom doesn’t just analyze the psalter; he works to get inside its emotions, even crafting new verses (not translations) inspired by the originals. As he unpacks the 13th Psalm, for example, after identifying the “silent time” and “confusion” and “saddening spin” of David’s initial pain, Folsom shows us what rejoicing in God’s salvation might look like:
“I bathe in your love,
Poured from above,
Your compassion never fails.
My ecstasy swells,
Your joy indwells,
Now safe from all that ails.”
Folsom connects that ecstatic feeling to other moments in Scripture, such as Moses’s blessing of Aaron and his sons that “the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you” (Numbers 8:25) and Paul’s hopeful expectation that, one day, “I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12) He centers the discussion around God’s unfailing love, a love that enables God to wait patiently as we struggle to apprehend, acknowledge, and accept it.
It can often feel as though darkness has gained the upper hand in today’s world, especially when you recognize “heathenish ministry” as the values propagated by Empire, in both its secular and Christian nationalist forms. When you remember that God has always had something better in mind for us, however, it can enable you “to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called” (Ephesians 4:1) because, as Margaret Fell exhorted her friends, “you have peace, you have joy, you have boldness.”
Buoyed by such salvation, we can wear Empire down, clearing the ground for a new, blissful community to flourish.
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