I, the Pursued: From Psalm 7

Psalm 7:1 - 10

LORD my God, I take refuge in you;
save and deliver me from all who pursue me,
or they will tear me apart like a lion
and rip me to pieces with no one to rescue me.

LORD my God, if I have done this
and there is guilt on my hands—
if I have repaid my ally with evil
or without cause have robbed my foe—
then let my enemy pursue and overtake me;
let him trample my life to the ground
and make me sleep in the dust.

Arise, LORD, in your anger;
rise up against the rage of my enemies.
Awake, my God; decree justice.
Let the assembled peoples gather around you,
while you sit enthroned over them on high.
Let the LORD judge the peoples.
Vindicate me, LORD, according to my righteousness,
according to my integrity, O Most High.
Bring to an end the violence of the wicked
and make the righteous secure—
you, the righteous God
who probes minds and hearts.

My shield is God Most High,
who saves the upright in heart.


As in many of the Hebrew Psalms, Psalm 7 has a clear-cut idea about good and bad, about who is righteous and who is evil. It is attributed to David, who apparently is praying about one of his adversaries. As such, it is what I would call a "warrior prayer," that is, a prayer that God would "take up the cause of right" and "slay those who are enemies."

I wonder if Cush, the Benjamite who apparently was the object of David's prayer here, was praying this same kind of prayer about David? You see, don't you, how round and round it can go.

When I prayed through the psalm today, my first questions were, "And what battles am I engaged in? What pursues me, threatening to overtake me? What waits to tear me into pieces, to dismember my soul and separate me from my self?"

My prayer was aimed a little differently than David's. I'm not in the kind of physical battle that seeks to "slay the wicked" -- or whoever opposes me. The battle that I wage is spiritual, much more interior.

So I began to pray about those things within me that "pursue" me, the interior "enemies" that chase me and want to have all of me. As I prayed, I wrote in my journal about them . . .

**the starving ego that manifests as an inner voice that will not stand being deprived of attention;

**a relentless perfectionism that makes even small projects and tasks massive undertakings;

**the ongoing guilt of having others give good gifts to me, and then the compulsion to try to "repay" in some form -- usually by over-extending myself;

**flimsy boundaries and an unrealistic appraisal of my own limitations;

**the false names and deceiving images that I live into without question; the many roles and identities that I take to be my life apart from the real essence that lives at my core.

Later in the psalm, David asks God to slay his enemies, to take a whet sword to them, to bend a bow toward them, to shoot flaming arrows at them.

I wondered if that is really what I want . . . for God to obliterate them, to wipe them out from within me.

I decided that complete annihilation is not what I want. Certainly, I don't want these pursuing enemies to have free reign over me, but I also acknowledge that they are a part of my humanity, a part of my "dust pocket," a part of what it means for me to be "not-God". I didn't ask God to judge them or kill them or do any of the things David wanted done to Cush.

I did ask God to love them, and to love me in them. I asked God to love my starving ego and my relentless perfectionism and my ongoing guilt and my limitations and my false names. I want God to love them into wholeness. I don't need violence done to these parts of me. These parts of Jerry need to be saturated in God's love. They need to experience the intimacy of mercy. They need to know the self-giving of generosity.

And further, I need to be able to stand on the dust, with all these flaws and enemies pursuing me, and know that even as they live within me, I'm still loved through and through by a Source and a Generosity and a Mercy more expansive than I can possibly comprehend.

The psalm was a good one today. I'm glad to have found myself in it.