Ps. 88.8 (wrath, loneliness and shame)

You have caused my close friends/ to stay away from me
you have made me / repulsive to them
I am closed in / and I can’t get out. 

Based on previous reflections we can begin to see this verse more clearly—the sense of incongruity, paradox and contradiction. In the first two lines he speaks about being utterly alone, of being left in the ‘open space’ created by humiliation and shame such that no one will approach him. Then, immediately, he shifts to the complete opposite—the sense of being “closed in and not being able to get out”. This duality was inherent in the first two images of the ‘pit’ and the water. The Pit was a wide open space of utter darkness (like the ‘wide open space’ of humiliation and loneliness); the water, the sense of being utterly surrounded imprisoned by the medium in which you exist. Perhaps what we see here is a type of recapitulation, with verses 6 (Pit) and 7 (water) being a type of imagistic way of saying what verse 8 details more concretely. What is important for us is to see that his communal lament at isolation is just as intense and central to his understanding of God’s wrath toward him. It is not the case that first he laments his ‘relationship to God’ and then moves into his ‘relationship with others’. Rather, he sees in his relationship with others the outworking of God’s wrath toward him. God shines through them, not necessarily above them or in isolation from them. 

We should pause too over the manner in which God’s wrath is being displayed: humiliation and shame. The psalmist is not suffering from ‘guilt’; rather, he has been ‘made into’ a public display that expels communion with others. In other words, he has been made into shame. He lives with a sense of a willful indifference---of people willfully avoiding him due to their horror over him. A simultaneous sense of being ‘looked upon’ and ‘recoiled from’. He is like a person of a horrible deformity without any person who will console him—his shame has no remainder, no outlet. It is total and it covers him, emanating from him like some dark light warding off companions. It leaves him not only in isolation, but in a perpetual awareness of his horror. We can, at this point, point to the fact that when ‘hell’ is portrayed it is this type of permanent, abiding shamefulness—a sense of being perpetually watched as an object of horror and embarrassment. It is, in other words, a communal inversion of goodness. Whereas the ‘good’ of communal being is glory (the ‘radiance’ of virility, health and strength) and communion; this ‘pit’ exhibits shame and willful isolation. This ‘state of shame’ is something, moreover, that has accompanied this psalmist from ‘boyhood’ (“I have been afflicted and nearly dead since boyhood…; vs. 15). For a parent, these lines are some of the most terrible in the psalter. As they point toward a life born and lived in shame and humiliation, a life that is not merely ‘alone’ but perpetually conscious of its horror.