Ps. 6.6 (a weary eye)

Ps. 6:6

I  /  have grown  /  weary  /  with my  /  groaning

Every night  /  I soak  /  my bed

I  /  dissolve  /  my couch  /  with my  /  tears

My eye  /  wastes away  /  because  /  of grief

It  /  grows weak  /  on account  /  of all  /  my enemies

Like a withering plant returning to the ground, our man, through his language, is showing his gradual dissolution. He is dissolving into the ground, and further down, he will arrive in Sheol. The words here come, one after another, as if he in his dying he is gathering all the strength he has left so as to entreat Yhwh for healing: weary – dissolve  - wastes away – grows weak. One almost gets here the sense of resignation, of inevitability. This is a downward spiral from which there does not seem to much more than hope for recovery.

Plants generally require sun and water to grow. Here, our sick man is given both but the images are inverted:

“Grown weary with my groaning”: Although it is a common enough claim, when one pauses to think about it, it is strange. The act of growth is generally associated with vitality. Yet here it is the groaning of sickness that has made him ‘grow’ weary. He is ‘growing’ in weakness rather than strength. Like some dark sun, his sickness is making him grow not upwards into the air, but downward into the ground and closer to Sheol; in a very disturbing image, it is as if he is feeding off of his groaning and sickness. Growth should be associated with strength and the unifying power of the body. Here, the sickness is making his bones and soul become ‘disturbed.’ They are ‘growing’ apart and they lose the power of the soul to maintain the integrity of the body.

“Every night I: soak my bed / dissolve my couch with tears”: We have had the opportunity before to contemplate the image of nightfall within biblical thought. A brief summary: in Genesis it is clear that a new day begins, not with sunrise, but with sundown. It is with the beginning of darkness and the blanket of sleep that descends upon the earth that a new day begins. One finds here a profound insight into God’s ‘working’: man is ‘made anew’ every day in the darkness of night and sleep. When man rises in the morning, he is only ‘late on the scene’. And, Adam-like, he has been (re)molded during the night.

Sleep is also the liberating of man from a sense of time as simply one moment after another. It is the closest man gets to the image of death, and yet it is the time for (re)creation; it is utter passivity and weakness and yet one of the most enliving times of the day. It is a hiatus that man not only looks forward to but needs. It is essential that man lose all sense of time and “fall” asleep so that he wake “up”.

To be unable to sleep is, therefore, a true curse. It signifies that something has gone profoundly wrong, either in the individual’s life or in the world around him. Not being able to close one’s eyes when all of creation is remade is to be unable to enter into the necessary rest of recreation. It is a type of death. Like a plant scorched by the sun, a man unable to sleep is burned alive by time.

For this man, his sickness is like a dark sun emanating a black light from within him and causing him to remain awake when everyone else is asleep. No only are his bones and soul “out of joint”, he is “out of joint” with the entire world around him. He is not only isolated from himself, he is isolated from everybody and everything around him. He probably wanders through his house, jealously looking on those who can close their eyes.

“My eye wastes away/grows weak…”: The eye is supposed to give forth ‘light’ and take it in. It is called the “light of the body”. It would be fascinating to trace uses of the ‘eye’ in biblical thought. There are three people that come to mind that could help us enter into this man’s experience: aged Isaac, Moses and Job. Isaac, with failing eyesight, could not discern the difference between his own two sons and mistakenly blessed the wrong one. There is surely something going on here more than a ‘failing eyesight’, as it points to Isaac’s own, ‘inner’, blindness and the fact that he was increasingly favoring one son over the other in a flagrant injustice. So, just as he committed favoritism in ‘broad daylight’ so too would his son’s blessing be stolen in ‘broad daylight’. Isaac was unable to ‘see’ what was happening in front of him. In the twilight of his life he is described as having ‘weak eyes’. It is because of his lack of vision that he is able to be deceived by his son, Jacob. Moses, on the other hand, lived his life in a growing understanding of Yhwh and Israel. On his deathbed, unlike Isaac, Moses commissioned the great Joshua and delivered several of the sermons contained in Deuteronomy.  Job stands much closer to our man in this regard. He describes his own anguish as wasting away his eye. And, more importantly, he describes it in the context of his body’s failure and his being close to death. Job’s experience is obviously more than physical. It points to his profound sense that his sickness and his wasting away are brought about because of God’s anger and wrath, an anger and wrath Job does not understand. His inability to perceive the divine realm and the mind of God is his ‘blindness’ and his ‘weakness’.  

With these we may hesitatingly conclude that our sick man’s eye is not merely a physical description. This man is dying prematurely, from a sickness that is tormenting him. He is ‘watching’ himself descend into Sheol and with every passing night the darkness of Sheol is descending over his eyes (or, “rising up” to take him). As we saw before, Sheol is not just “a place” but the abandonment of Yhwh. For this darkness to be creeping into our man’s eye is, for him, as if he was alive and watching himself being torn apart.

And, all of this is tied to Yhwh’s ‘departure’ from him. When one stands apart from Yhwh, in exile, one cannot see properly. One is, already in some mysterious way, closer to death than life. And, because death has no divinity in it, it is simply darkness. There is no truth to be found there. There is no glory there. It is not a place for adventure but just an empty room of shadows. In Sheol everything is confusion. There is nothing there to so as to gain some direction; no conclusions could ever be reached. It is as if everything were ‘out of focus’ (hence, one’s eyes would be ‘dim’ there). It is not the source of anything.

“…my enemies”: This is the first mention of “enemies” in the Psalm and their presence is strange. It is not entirely clear who they are or what they have done to the sick man that would designate them ‘enemies’. And, there is very little to go on in the rest of the Psalm. Their ‘strangeness’ is obvious. Whatever ‘enemy’ this man had would have seemed to have been the sickness itself. The psalm, until now, has been a dialogue between this sick man and Yhwh. And it has made sense within that context. Now, however, a very ambiguous third party has arrived.

One explanation is that they represent men who have accused this man of sinfulness as the reason for his sickness. In this regard they would be like Job’s friends, who are really his accusers. It is important to note that nowhere in the psalm does this man make any reference to sinfulness nor does he pray for forgiveness or do any other form of penance as the mark of sin. Another explanation is that these enemies are men exulting over his downfall; they were like birds-of-prey waiting for him to die. Ultimately, I think the former explanation is better. It highlights the fact that our sick man is also experiencing alienation from his surrounding community. Whether they would have regarded themselves as ‘enemies’ is obviously questionable; they may have seen themselves as offering a form of support or guidance.

The eye is supposed to be “light” and “life”. For our sick man, his eyes are dimming; they are wasting away. Their clouding over is the emblem of a clouding confusion that is coming up to gather him. It is a difficult experience to describe. Every faculty of this man is dissolving, becoming ‘thinner’. And even his ability to see this ‘thinning’ is, itself, departing from him. The only thing that can emerge from this place is a cry for help. Because he is becoming a wraith, he cannot stand upon himself to make this call; rather, he must throw himself, without form, upon Yhwh and hope he will be given his substance back.