All That I Never Had
Psalm 69
Am I expected to return
things I didn’t steal?
12 So remember your creator while you are young,
before the evil days come,……..
4b when a person is startled by the chirp of a bird,
yet their singing is hard to hear;
5 when they will be afraid to go up a hill,
and terrors will stalk the way,…….
before the silver cord is snapped
the bowl of gold is cracked,
the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
the pulley is broken at the cistern,
7 the dust returns to earth, as it was,
and the spirit returns to God, who gave it!
2 Bear one another’s burdens — in this way you will be fulfilling the Torah’s true meaning, which the Messiah upholds. 3 For if anyone thinks he is something when he is really nothing, he is fooling himself. 4 So let each of you scrutinize his own actions.
24 Then Yeshua told his talmidim, “If anyone wants to come after me, let him say ‘No’ to himself, take up his execution-stake, and keep following me. 25 For whoever wants to save his own life will destroy it, but whoever destroys his life for my sake will find it. 26 What good will it do someone if he gains the whole world but forfeits his life? Or, what can a person give in exchange for his life?
Rhetorical questions— bearing one another’s burdens— fulfilling true meaning— self-scrutiny— saying “No” to yourself.
It occurred to me that I assume that the questions in Scripture are rhetorical ones, to be answered in due course by the author who asked the question in the first place. But— what if they’re not? What if we are supposed to actually try to answer the question? What then?
“What good will it do someone if he gains the whole world but forfeits his life?”
“What can a person give in exchange for his life?”
When it comes to returning things I never stole, it seems to me that we are often required to do that kind of thing. It happens when we ‘give’ other people things that can’t be given. For example: we give someone else responsibility for our choices. Or we believe that someone is some kind of guru and misplace our trust. Or we tell lies that other people believe, because we have also told ourselves the same lie. Or we convince ourselves we have found the perfect soulmate, when the other person never entertained such a notion.
When the inevitable disappointment happens and the ‘givers’ (I’ll call them ‘ungivers’) are betrayed by reality, but still hang on to their illusion, then they often feel robbed, and demand that the ungiveable thing be returned. That is when this question scorches its way into speech. The ungiveable thing must be returned, but it’s impossible. Misery ensues, even when the ‘unreceiver’ understands what’s happened. As long as the ungiver still believes that something’s been stolen; that they have lost something precious— then there can be no remedy.
Think of stalkers; or people with crushes on strangers. Think of grownups acting like children who cry because you ate the cookie they gave you and now the cookie is gone. I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that the original sin might well have been wanting to ‘keep your cake and eat it too’. It’s manifestly impossible, and yet we keep right on insisting on suffering because we can’t manage to do it. Huh.
About the question, “What good will it do someone if he gains the whole world but forfeits his life?” I think it might demonstrate nearly the same thing as the conundrum of the ‘ungiver.’ To imagine that the world is something that could be ‘gained’ at all is the first mistake, and the error is frighteningly compounded by the failure to realize that we will inevitably forfeit our lives if we even try to gain the ungainable.
The last question, “What can a person give in exchange for his life?” is trickier than I thought. Hidden in it is the implication that all this trading of lives in exchange for some imagined treasure is a transaction that we conduct entirely within ourselves. What we must give in exchange for the imagined world (read “world” as “everything we have ever wanted”) is our hope of ever being true to ourselves. It just isn’t possible to give our life away in order to get something we want….if we did, there would be no-one left to get the goodies. It just won’t work!
So, “if anyone thinks he is something when he is really nothing, he is fooling himself. So let each of you scrutinize his own actions.”
Funny— I haven’t even gotten to the passage yet that moved me the most. Maybe the evil days are not such a big deal after all.
startled on the path
by flitting birdsong
the hill ahead
leans over me
and something grim
crunches behind
the silver cord is snapped
the bowl of gold is cracked
the pitcher is shattered at the spring
the pulley is broken at the cistern
the dust returns
to earth as it was
the bowl of gold is cracked
the pitcher is shattered at the spring
the pulley is broken at the cistern
the dust returns
to earth as it was
Now I return to God
all that I never had
birds
fly by
singing
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