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We’re back to the greatest Psalm of all the Psalms, 119. Today we marinade in the eight stanza’s entitled “Daleth” which is the 4th letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Some Hebrew scholars point out that this word means door or gate and the image of the Hebrew symbolizes a person bowing or bending over, revealing that the way we pass through is by lowering ourselves or by being humbled.

Humiliation is almost universally understood in our modern culture as a terrible thing. We have a month dedicated to being “Proud” not humble. We have 20% of the US sitting in a therapist’s office trying to sort through the pain of their own humiliations. Suffice it to say, the spiritual benefit and deeper reality is almost completely lost on us. We would rather avoid humiliation. We take mind altering drugs so we can feel confident or comfortable without accomplishing very much. We numb ourselves to the beauty behind our anxiety. Our culture says that prostrating ourselves makes us a victim or abdicates our power unto another, when sacred text reveals that down is the path up.

We must see the tyrannical soul within us when we think and behave like this. We promote and project our false self who knows it doesn’t ultimately exist.

If the Psalmist spoke these words today, it’s possible that a mandatory reporter would say something. A person who feels so bad must need professional help. This is our clue as to how blind, lost and stupid our culture has become. Our ideology is to be a people who is never shaped by pain or suffering. We blame others for our pain. We claim we are oppressed (we have no clue), never realizing these are gifts or portals through which we find God and truly come to know ourselves.

²⁵ My soul clings to the dust;
    give me life according to your word!

The Hebrew reads: “She cleaves to the soil, the soul of me.” Human life is a dialectic reality. Depth and meaning are a wavelength or a flow whereby the high’s are experienced in comparison to the lows. To avoid one is to miss the other, to embrace one is to experience the other. Dancing is paired to weeping (Ecclesiastes 3:4). One aspect of our humanity is our inescapable clasp on the bottom, the other aspect is the pinnacle of life which is possessed as our Maker speaks to us. Our world who has forsaken the God is consigned to live in the trough of the wave and we’re too fragile to bear it.

²⁶ When I told of my ways, you answered me;
    teach me your statutes!
²⁷ Make me understand the way of your precepts,
    and I will meditate on your wondrous works.

How did a culture that is so phototropic, striving to project ourselves and our lives as a success, become so resistant to authentic self examination or the interrogation of God? We’ve conflated our image with self. We seek the right lighting, background, and “likable” context, we fain spiritual progress, but cannot sit still long enough to hear and obey God’s voice. The prostrated self can pass through the gate, but content creators with a selfie-stick have no sense the gate even exists. Until we bow, we will not know who we are on the others side of it. Like the trolly on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, we don’t pass into Reality from our land of make-believe.

²⁸ My soul melts away for sorrow;
    strengthen me according to your word!

The Hebrew reads: “She is racked, my soul within me.” Hot wax is placed on a rack to cool. It holds the basic shape but gravity has an effect. Wax drips, it seeps, weeps, and drops through as a metaphor for how the soul knows (is shaped by) sorrow. The Psalmist is not blaming colonial oppression, or glass ceilings, or institutional “isms”, nor his parents or upbringing for how he feels. None of those scenarios actually have the power to cause his pain, and the dripping of his soul will not cease if all of these could change. Strength, not happiness, is what is needed, and strength comes from God and what He has to say. Who would have thought, knowing God could make us anti-fragile?

²⁹ Put false ways far from me
    and graciously teach me your law!
³⁰ I have chosen the way of faithfulness;
    I set your rules before me.
³¹ I cling to your testimonies, O Lord;
    let me not be put to shame!
³² I will run in the way of your commandments
    when you enlarge my heart!

Healing, that is true healing, not anesthetization…means we have become real or authentic. It means we have grown up, not in a sterile, pristine, idilic environment with no one to blame, but have come through the darkness, struggle, anxiety and pain, and have become shaped by these experiences for the good. Avoiding pain, blaming others for our weaknesses, are all the “false ways” that our so-called experts claim is how we navigate hardship. These “blind guides” deny God and His voice and thus lack the GPS coordinates for us to come to know our true self found in God, and the world is led astray.

The Psalmist seeks to order his life by the rules established by the Designer of life. The soul that clings to the dust, is now clinging to the testimonies of God. A testimony is a comprehensive framework for all that God is. Testimonies speak to God’s nature, to who God is, to all He does. How amazing! In the exact moment that we cling to the dust, we can also cling to the essence of who God is. These are not feelings, but determinations. This is how we will avoid being put to shame, or experiencing the loss of God.

The last comment of running toward the commandments stands in contrast to our world that runs from them. This isn’t a practice we would naturally do, it is something that happens as God enlarges our heart, our inner self. In other words, as we grow up in God, as we mature in human life, we grow in our trust and dependence upon the commands of God. These are not burdens. God is not a killjoy or a buzzkill. God is the path to finding our healing, authenticity, and maturity. God is our guide through suffering, as one who has suffered himself.

At some point in everyone’s life… we’ ‘ll try a prayer. With almost no Faith, we’ll launch a request upward to the Great Vending Machine in the sky. Most of these “test prayers” come when the ordinary course of things is not palatable and we seek a means of escape. God is not novocain. These prayers are for our circumstances, not for us, and as they bounce off the ceiling, or when the answer takes longer than Grub-hub, we conclude that we’re in it all by ourselves. If we would truly find our answer, we must be willing to find the end of our fictional lives. We must come to the end of our blaming ourselves or others. We must surrender the outcomes instead of pretending we control them. The rigidness of reality is the immovability of God, and that is what we need if we are ever to find ourself on the other side of our suffering. If we double down on self-reliance, or seek an institution to fix it for us, then the most we can get from life is a delusion of reality, and the illusion of ourself.

May we humble ourselves, bow through the gate, and receive the words of God.