Ps. 77.3 (memory and torment)

I remember God / and then I groan
I ponder on it / and my spirit grows weak. 

Here, we begin one of the thematic marks of this psalm: remembering and pondering. The psalmist, and his relationship with God, has become something internalized. Note how, before, the psalmist’s actions were external. Verse 2, in particular, portrayed the psalmist as “seeking” and his has being “extended”. Now, that energy turns inward. This turn is something profoundly disturbing—in the absence of the external marks of the covenantal power, the psalmist begins to fold in on himself and his memory. This inward shift marks a true poverty, an attempt to feed off a memory. It is the mark of absence. More terrible still, is the fact that memory here operates as weakening force. In many other psalms the act of memory is that by which the psalmist participates in the “saving works” of God. Memory, in those contexts, is life itself, a river that joins the psalmist to God. Now, however, the water flowing into the psalmist by way of memory is deadening. It causes him to “groan” and his spirit “to grow weak”. More problematic still is how this act of remembering is similar to what we have observed in vs. 1-2. We have pointed out how, in the previous two verses, the psalmist is contrasting his current activity with God’s passivity. In the present, his “voice” cries out—God’s voice is only in the past. Whereas his hands stretch out to God, the hands of God in Moses and Aaron, have been withdrawn. We find the same dynamic at work here—only once in the psalm is God’s act of memory referred to. In verse 9 the psalmist asks, “Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he locked up his compassion in anger?” Other than this verse, the psalm is silent as to God’s internal act of ‘pondering/memory’. And, importantly, the question is about God’s forgetting. We should recall that God’s act of ‘remembering’ is tantamount to God’s act of deliverance. Whenever God remembers, his ‘great works’ begin again. The relationship between the two forms of memory is that of call (God) and response (man). The psalmist is presented with this terrible question: is he the only one embodying the memory of the covenant? Has the call stopped such that only the response is left? And this is the point: a response without a call is death, a source of ‘groaning’ and ‘weakening’. This is why every action taken by the psalmist is only leading further into his demise: all his crying out, his seeking, his extended hands…they only lead to “no comfort”, “groaning” and “spirit weakening”. When the works of God are silent, they do not then operate merely as a nothing—they become a torment.  While it seems to the psalmist that God can forget, he cannot.