Ps. 42.4 (salvation, history and memory)

“Let me / remember / these things – and let me / pour out / my soul; - how I used to / cross with the multitude, - I used to / walk with them / to God’s house – with the sound / of shouting / and thanksgiving – amid the pilgrim crowd.”  Preliminary (remembrance): We concluded our previous reflection with the important point that the psalmist dilemma is not to be resolved abstractly but in deliverance (i.e., in his ability to enter into God’s temple and ‘see his face’). In other words, the present will be marked not by intellectual (or ‘spiritual’) acceptance but by hope. It is with this firmly in mind that we can understand the shift in the psalmist’s mind to the past, and his imploring of God to “let me remember” and “let me pour out my soul”.  Because the only answer to the psalmist’s dilemma is his (real/historical) reunion with God’s temple, his only succor in the present will not consist in meditations revolving around eternal truths; rather, it will be memory of the concrete and real experience he had in the past of entering God’s temple. For this psalmist, salvation will be historical and not through mysticism/ecstasy or a type of wisdom that enables one to be at home in the present.  Rather, due to his alienation from God’s temple, the present is understood to be a time of exile, what he will later describe as a “flood” and “darkness”. Pour out my soul: we find here again a reference to liquid. The opening two verses focused on God’s presence as “living water/streams”. Here, when the psalmist turns his attention, painfully, to the past, he sees this turning as operating in the opposite fashion: rather than ‘drinking in’ God’s face (in the temple), his memory is causing him to be ‘poured out’ even further. What we notice, therefore, is that the allusion in verse 1 to the deer who thirsts for water, finds its source of thirst here, in the psalmist’s memory of the past. It is through his continuous recalling of his entering into God’s presence that empties himself, thereby causing him to thirst for that reality once again. This is important to note: the psalmist, rather than shunning these painful memories, actually cultivates them, causing him to thirst even more. Them: the pain caused by memory is not simply the fact that the psalmist has been removed for God’s temple; rather, it is the fact that he, along with the multitude, cannot worship God. There is no possibility of dividing these realities (temple and multitude) in the psalmist’s mind. To worship God means to, liturgically, worship him in the midst of his people. Shouting, thanksgiving and the pilgrim crowd: the psalmist does not seem to be remembering a generalized experience in the temple but of his participation within a liturgical festival(s). The ‘pilgrim crowd’ indicates this. Furthermore, and this is something we have emphasized before, but the height of the psalmist’s ‘thirst for God’s face’ is found in his memory of his liturgical praise of him. Liturgy is the culmination and highest good the psalmist’s frequently allude to. While they will pray for deliverance from enemies, the goal of that deliverance is so that they can, once again, worship God without fear. The more one treasures offering liturgy to God the more profoundly will one experience and seek deliverance from exile.