Ps. 77.1 (crying out silence)

With my voice / I cry out / to God
crying with my voice / to God / that he would give ear to me. 

It is crucial in approaching this psalm that we recognize that the psalmist gives us, in this opening verse, the reason for the psalm’s composition. It is “that he would give ear to me.” We will need to return to this simply fact over and over again as we proceed. As we know from other psalms, the image of God ‘giving ear’ is not merely his auditorially hearing the prayer of the psalmist. For God to hear, is for God to act. This is not to reduce these two to the same reality—because for the psalmists God is very much a ‘person’, they understand him to be susceptible to petitions. He must first ‘hear’ and then ‘act’. The desire here seems to be that God truly turn his attention to the psalmist’s words. That he truly ‘hear’ them, consider them, and act based upon that deep act of hearing-perception. This hearing is not a purely interior matter. It receives the vocal and auditory “crying out” of the psalmist. This only enhances the sense that the communication between the psalmist and God is a total communication. The voice of the psalmist actually enters into the hearing of God (or, so he hopes). For him God is not ‘less than the material’ or ‘auditory’, but more so; although God is not material, he is not ‘less than the material’. Hence, one’s whole being must move toward God, not merely an interior (silent) portion. This is very important to grasp in this psalm as, in fact, much of the psalm is concerned with the fact that the psalmist’s anguish is, terribly, an internal affair. He later says, in distinction to this verse, that “I am so distraught that I cannot speak” (vs. 4). The one thing this psalmist does now is “ponder”, “remember” and “reflect”—and it is the one activity that utterly consumes him. All of this anticipates a theme that will pervade the psalm: that of interior silence and exterior speaking. The psalmist himself is both. God, however, is only silent. In this opening verse what we see then is the psalmist’s exteriorizing his interior silence (his memory has encased him in silence) so as to move God to hear and ‘speak’. Importantly, the use of the word “voice” here will be referred to again at the end of the psalm when the psalmist turns his mind to the past when God’s “voice” was heard (vs. 18). That voice is apparently now “locked up” (vs. 9). What the psalmist is seeking, is for God to ‘exteriorize’ himself—to perform his creative acts of speech. Only when God speaks will the psalmist duality between silence and ‘crying out’ be resolved, and his “answer found” (vs. 6). Until that time, there is no resolution.