Ps. 64.1-2 (hidden from chaos)

Hear me / O God / in my complaint
protect my life / from the dreadful threats / of enemies.
Hide me / from a wicked mob 
from a klavern / of evildoers… 

Although this is a complaint to God, and aimed at getting him to move into action, it is interesting that there are only three directives issued at God, all of which are stated in the first three lines: “Hear me…protect my life…hide me…”. All the way until the close of the psalm there will be no other statement/directive aimed at God. The rest of the psalm will divide in two: the first half focusing on the nature of the wicked, the second focusing on the nature of God’s response. These opening lines, then, will resonate throughout. They do not merely apply to the first half but will gain depth as we come to see the effect of being “hidden” and “protected” by God. That said, it is important here to note the thrust of the directives. The psalmist wants to be hidden—to be inaccessible and invisible to the wicked. This is key, as this sense of ‘hiddenness’ is written over the entire psalm. The wicked congregate in hiding and their attacks are not those of open warfare but of ‘shooting from hiding’, ‘shooting without warning’ and ‘secret snares’. Furthermore, they are supremely confident that their attacks and traps are so adroitly handled that they will never be uncovered. All of this will lead the psalmist to exclaim at the end of the meditation on the wicked, “The inward nature and the human heart—how deep they are.” The point is clear: the psalmist feels himself to be the prey of hunters who he knows are seeking his life, but he cannot locate where their attack will emerge or when. This is the nature of anxiety: the sure sense of attack/threat with the equally sure sense that one cannot anticipate it—the sense of terrible exposure. (We will, in the next reflection, show how this contributes to the sense of horror.) It is because of this sense of an inability to foresee the attack that the remedy, for the psalmist, is for him to be more profoundly hidden. He is not asking to be granted insight into their plans. He is not asking to be empowered by God to fight against them. Rather, he wants to be hidden deeper than the depths of their “inward nature and their human heart”—in a place that is (and this is the point) inaccessible to them, a place that they cannot locate and their schemes cannot penetrate. The wicked believe their objectives to stand at the foundation, that nothing could circumvent them or exist at a more profoundly deep level. As we will see more clearly later, this ‘basement’ the wicked cannot locate, is God. He is the one who has the ability to be prior and deeper than their designs of chaos. It is in him that one can look up and see the swirling chaos above. It is in God that there is something more able to “surprise” than the attacks of the wicked.