Kia and Sue Erber have both told me that the Hebrew word translated as “depths” actually has several alternative meanings. It means depths, yes, but also despair, and “a narrow place.” And so we can read the first lines of Psalm 130 like this:
“Out of a narrow place, I cry to you—O God, hear me and answer from your wideness.”
Think of being caught in a place that cramps and constricts your movements and reduces your vision to just what you can see in front of you or above you, and the walls of the narrow place itself. Your narrow place might be depression—where all you can see are the walls—or anxiety and fear, where you imagine all the terrors you are unable to see. Or grief or loneliness or pain, where your vision of the world is reduced down to your loss.
A good illustration for this version is a place in southeastern Oregon called Crack in the Ground—because that’s exactly what it is. It’s a two-mile long rift less than six feet across, in a wide, flat plain of volcanic rock.
The surrounding desert abounds in plant and animal life. Sagebrush, grasses, flowers, junipers and pine trees, birds, insects, and animals thrive in this environment. Because the land is flat, you have a panoramic view of this beautiful ecosystem in every direction.
But as you descend into the crack, you quickly lose sight of the life around you. Your vision narrows to the craggy rocks and the rough, stoney path you are following down into the crack. Your attention turns totally to planning each step so as not to trip or fall or sprain an ankle. At one point in that journey you are 70 feet deep in the earth, and you can touch the dark, rocky walls on both sides of you. It’s shadowy and cold down there, and all you can see of the sky is a narrow, jagged band of blue, far above your head. And then you have a choice. You can choose to go back the way you came, and there’s a hard climb back to the light and warmth and the wide expanse of the surface. Or you can go forward on a slope that is slightly easier but a lot longer, and the way will still be narrow and stony.
It feels to many of us right now that we, as a nation, are in a narrow place. We have been descending steadily into the chilly, rocky darkness for a very long time. The institutions we trusted to protect our freedoms have been corrupted or destroyed. Our Constitution seems to be useless against people who break its laws and guidelines with impunity.
We watch in horror as each new moral barrier is breached. We think things can’t get any worse than today’s atrocity. And then they do, over and over again. And we mourn our loss of trust in the rule of law and the ideals of democracy.
It’s very hard to visualize how we can get out of this narrow place—this Crack in the Ground—how we can muster the energy we need for that hike back uphill into the daylight. And from our narrow point of view, it often seems as if getting back to where we started is no longer an option. Too much has been lost or broken.
And so we beg the God of wide viewpoints for help.
The Psalm then says:
If you, God, keep account of sins, God, who can stand?
But with you is forgiveness and so you are revered.
Our nation needs to start, as the Psalm does, with confession. America was built intentionally as an experiment in a new kind of government. Its ideals—a government of the people, by the people, and for the people—are noble. But we need to confess to each other and to God that this nation has never lived up to those ideals, although at times we have moved closer to realizing them. The Constitution we revere include denials of rights for indigenous people and enslaved people, and provisions for maintaining the power of enslavers. Women were not included at all. In the narrow viewpoint of our founders, these people were not even visible as human. And America has never apologized or atoned for the genocide that pushed colonization from the east coast to the west, and beyond, or the inhuman brutality of chattel slavery, or the omission of half the population from the rights and responsibilities of full citizenship.
We also need to say aloud that if a national budget is a moral statement, ours says that our priorities are enriching a few of us and letting the rest fend for themselves. In the narrow viewpoint of those who create that budget, poor people do not even exist.
As Americans, we need to acknowledge these sins of both commission and omission in hope and faith that we can do better.
The Psalm continues:
I wait for God, my soul waits and I hope for God’s word.
And we wait, and we hope in the depths of our narrow Crack in the Ground.
And yet—even in the narrowness of our predicament, we can see, we can hear, that God is still speaking. More and more, people are expressing hope for a better future, in online comments and articles and blogs, in sermons and books and movies and over coffee. These conversations are acknowledging things that have not worked for most people for most of our history, and proposing new ways of relating to each other and to our planet that can enable everyone and everything to thrive.
Recently, four humans had the privilege of seeing Earth from a very wide place. The Canadian Astronaut, Jeremy Hansen, said this from beyond the Moon:
The purpose of humanity is joy and lifting one another up, creating versus destroying. And that’s how I launched, and I launched with the expectations… that I would see the proof of it with my own eyes, and I definitely have. And I think that’s really reassuring. And we’re glad that we can remind people that we can do better as a human race by lifting each other up and collaborating.
This is the love, the mercy, the compassion of God, who is the creator and sustainer of the Cosmos—all space and all things in space—and of Olam—which is all of time and all that has existed or will exist. Love endures. Compassion is always present. Mercy happens. The helpers show up. And our purpose is to add our piece of love to the Cosmos, to Olam, to increase the ratio of creation and love to destruction and hate. This is the wideness of God that we affirm.
And we also affirm that God has been with us in the narrow place, all along. Even when we feel abandoned and alone in the depths, in the constricted place, God is there with us, disguised as a fellow human who loves and heals and comforts, who grows angry, who suffers and dies.
But does not stay dead.
Jesus descended into the narrowest of places: a tomb. But that narrow place could not hold the power of love. And even in this narrow place we are in now, we see the mighty energy of love and justice that transcends despair.
The Spirit surprises us with reminders to participate in God’s wideness—sometimes in unlikely places. Recently, I walked into a public restroom and encountered a bottle of liquid soap on the sink. It was decorated in cheerful colors, and its label announced boldly:
“Joy is an act of resistance.”
Joy is both the motivator and the result of mass demonstrations like No Kings marches; of inflatable frog suits and line dances at ICE headquarters; of ordinary people bringing food and clean laundry to their neighbors in Minneapolis; and of friends who get together over coffee to write postcards to voters they’ll never meet. Joy transforms and overpowers hate.
The Spirit finds creative ways around or through the constrictions of the narrow place. The State of Idaho recently passed a law that prevented Boise from flying the all-inclusive rainbow flag on public property. So Boise lined a major residential boulevard with rainbow flags on light poles. Next, Idaho expanded the definition of “public space,” to include parking strips and median strips. So Boise took the rainbow flags down—and painted the state-owned flagpoles in rainbow colors.
The Spirit reminds us that we are not alone. We can see photos of demonstrations and marches that fill city streets for miles and even bring hundreds of people out to the highways near small towns in the Skagit Valley and eastern Washington. Through those photos, we are looking at the wideness of God’s love that is so much bigger and more powerful than the pinched, narrow view of fear or hate.
The Psalm goes on:
I wait for God, my soul waits and I hope for God’s word.
My soul looks for God more than sentinels for daybreak.
Waiting through the night means staying woke—not only to injustice and inequality, but also to the signs all around us that God is with us and has been with us all along.
And when we try to see from God’s wider perspective, the destructiveness of this era looks like a groundbreaking, a loosening and clearing of the soil, or a slow gestation period in a cold winter—in preparation for birthing a new nation that truly includes all who live here, where justice can’t be purchased or corrupted, where peace rather than armament is our goal, where no one goes hungry or dies of exposure on a sidewalk.
The Psalm concludes:
More than sentinels for daybreak, let us hope in God,
For with God is mercy, with God is plenteous redemption,
And God will redeem us from all our sins.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, and all the gifts of the Spirit are among us right now—even in the narrow place, even at the bottom of Crack in the Ground—as surely as we know the sun will rise tomorrow.
AMEN