Or, why it hurts to know God
Psalm 139
For the director of music. Of David. A psalm.
1 O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.
5 You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,"
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
16 your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I awake,
I am still with you.
19 If only you would slay the wicked, O God!
Away from me, you bloodthirsty men!
20 They speak of you with evil intent;
your adversaries misuse your name.
21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD,
and abhor those who rise up against you?
22 I have nothing but hatred for them;
I count them my enemies.
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
24 See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
The first time I read verses 13 to 17 I wept as I hadn't done since I was a child. Wept, as if I were in some secret place and no one could see me or have any knowledge of me. I wasn't alone though. I have not been alone since I came to know God - the first time. Still less am I ever alone now - and that by my choosing.
The first time I came to know God I also became a voracious reader of the Bible. In the twenty-odd years that have elapsed since my first crisis conversion I've read the Bible many times, cover to cover, though in no particular order and with emphasis on certain Books that I read again and again. Isaiah. Jeremiah. The Lamentations. The Song of Songs. Proverbs. Psalms. The Book of Job, of Jonah, of Esther, Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes. The moment of my greatest reassurance and certitude in my faith came when I first read Psam 91, possibly (in my own poor opinion) the most beautiful of all the Psalms. And the moment of my clearest apprehension of the nearness of God came when I first read that handful of verses from Psalm 139.
I was born with a congenital deformity of the left hand and arm. It's known by one of two terms: Poland's Syndrome or Poland's Anomaly. The right side of the body is affected twice as often as the left (so I am an anomaly within an anomaly). It's estimated that the condition, in some form or another (not all forms are blatant and obvious), affects 1 in 30,000 births - which makes it common but hard to recognise.
And yet, so the Psalm says, I am wonderfully and fearfully made, made by deliberate, intelligent, wilfull design to be the way that I am - a statistical anomaly and a genetic freak, a gimp. And when I first read those words what I felt was profound relief. I was not an 'accident'. I was not the result of a bad roll of the genetic dice. I was not simply the outcome of a poor combination of genetic material. I was intended. I was made. I was designed. Not only was that so, but all the days of my life, in full and perfect detail, were known in advance before any of them had come to be. Which meant that I had nothing to hide, nothing to pretend, nothing to keep back.
I was known, as I was, and I could for the very first time be completely and absolutely myself - because the surety for that certainty had been paid, upfront and for no good reason that I could discern, by Another.
I grew out of my attachment to Jesus. I grew out of my faith in the God of the Christians. But I remember the truth of the relief I felt when I realised that even a thing as obscure and unworthy as I was and am, was known, was taken notice of, had come to be through the will of something greater than myself.
When I was a child, long before my crisis conversion, I'd sit and read my Mother's old Bible - which was a huge thing, complete with reproductions of Old Master paintings of Biblical scenes and the Words of Our Lord in blood red print. And Something would sit by my side and keep me company. It was that same Something that I first mis-identified as Christ, and later recognised as a Thing infinitely more terrible. What the likes of KFC (our Resident 'prophet' and hotline to God) will never understand is that I have never lost my faith in God -only in a particular Name of God. I've come to realize that the Attributes of God are not what the Christians say they are, but I've also come to realize that they are accurately and rightly portrayed in the Bible and particularly in the Old Testament. And most particularly, as they are portrayed in the Book of Psalms.
Nothing that lives was created without purpose or reason, and in every case that purpose and reason is the same. That the life that is lived by the Living Thing created by God should, and will, redound to the Glory of God - even if that Glory is incomprehensible to those who perceive it.
After my encounter with Psalm 139, and the terrible affects and effects it wrought in my life (I have never been closer to suicide than I was in the immediate aftermath of reading Psalm 139) I was left with a question: why? Why was I shaped in the shape that I have?
There has never been any answer given to that question, and I doubt, very much, that I well ever receive an answer. Twenty-odd years later it no longer matters. I'm content with being the sonofabitch that I have become. If God don't like how I've turned out - then too bad. I can always go to Hell - and count on the presence of an interesting bunch of fellow damned sinners to keep me company.
And if, in consequence of the shaping effects of my deformity on my character as a whole, my character and my acts redound to the Glory of God as King even over the flesh It shapes to Its will, and if that will, in my case, is as perverse as the shape which molds my flesh - then that's the business of God, and not of myself or anyone else.
Let me tell you a fundamental truth. It hurts to know God. It deforms. But, even so, and though I am damned through it and because of it, I would rather know God than not. What greater treasure could I possess?