Ps. 88.9 (not my will, but why have you forsaken me)

my eye has grown weak / from suffering
I have called to you / O Yhwh / every day
I have stretched out / my palms to you. 

The ‘weak eye’ may be an image for an entire bodily sinking into weakness. It may be, too, that the eye is weak due to tears. However we understand it, the psalmist is telling Yhwh that he is beginning to buckle underneath the weight of his wrath. Yhwh is crushing him. And he can no longer withstand the torrent and the isolation and his entire being is starting to dissipate. Importantly, from this state of weakness he then tells Yhwh that he has been, every day, calling out to him, stretching out his palms to him. It is a fascinating insight—although the psalmist attributes his suffering to Yhwh in a type of ‘perfect’ display of wrath, he still, from the midst of that wrath, calls out to Yhwh. In other words, he does not simply accept passively his suffering but implores Yhwh to redeem him. This ‘every day’ that he calls out to Yhwh encompasses every day that Yhwh has “squashed him”, put him “at the bottom of the Pit” and “made me repulsive to my close friends”. For the psalmist, Yhwh’s anger/wrath toward him is not the final word. Rather, it can be trumped by his redemption. We see this over-and-over again in the psalms: that Yhwh’s ultimate will for his people is redemption and salvation. That will for them is the most powerful display of Yhwh possible and subjugates his wrath to a penultimate position. His wrath ‘serves’ his redemption, not the other way around (caveat: here, there is no indication of this wrath being a ‘service’ to his redemption, there are no enemies; Yhwh is the only actor). It is because the psalmist is convinced of that, that he can, within the wrath of Yhwh, pray to Yhwh for salvation. Were he not convinced of this, his stance would be that of willing-resignation. He would, in other words, fall silent. (How much suffering continues because of this silence?). 

In this we begin to see how prayer works within the dialectic and contradiction of suffering that we have explored in the previous verses: prayer moves along a similar, but reverse, movement. Whereas suffering produced competing and contradictory images, prayer for redemption attempts to reach toward the unity of salvation; it refuses to be silenced in the face of the contradiction but reaches out toward Yhwh imploring him to work ‘his wonders for the dead’. (vs. 10). The contradiction of wrath must be subsumed beneath Yhwh’s salvation. Within that wrath, prayer will accurately describe the horrendous state of that wrath, but it will not stop there, seeing in it a final disposition of Yhwh. Prayer will continue to implore Yhwh to overcome his wrath. To view this as ‘presumptuous’ is, in fact, itself presumptuous—as it fails to grasp the ultimate will of Yhwh for salvation. (“Not my will but yours be done….My God, my God, why have you forsaken me…”).