The Great Nevertheless

I posted some thoughts yesterday about the assumptions underlying our prayer. I chose a couple of stanzas from Psalm 43 as a reference point, representing some themes that run through the Hebrew Psalms with some consistency. The psalm implies that God has rejected the person praying -- or the larger tribe to which he is committed -- with the sign of that rejection being the pray-er's "mourning" and experience of "foes" around him/her.

In short, the person praying has taken an exterior situation of oppression or difficulty and made a leap of abstraction: This must mean God is absent, or God has rejected me.

This morning, my Benedictine prayerbook (A Shorter Morning and Evening Prayer: The Psalter of The Liturgy of the Hours, Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press) led me to Habakkuk 3. The external situation in the chapter again seems to be oppression, as the early verses of the chapter seek to remind God of times past when Divine intervention delivered God's people from trouble.

The chapter takes a surprising turn, though, in the final verses of chapter 3. It stands in such stark contrast to the conditional perspective of Psalm 43, it is worth giving equal time.


Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.

The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.
(Hab. 3:17-19, NIV)


I wonder . . . is the prophet offering a hypothetical situation? Or is this the actual life-circumstance of this pray-er?

The situation is dire, with most all the externals of life pulled out from underneath him . . . a failure in many respects, or at least the prospects for prosperity have been pulled out from beneath him.

The person praying, though, does not assert that God has rejected or abandoned the people, nor does he follow the "normal" patterns of assigning blame, which believes that if _____ has happened, then surely _____ must have happened to cause it.

Further, contrary to so much ancient religion -- and a good bit of contemporary "faith" as well -- the prophet does not allow his life-situation to dictate his inner life, his connection to his God.

Everything in the outer world is coming up zeroes . . . loss, diminishment, failure, fruitlessness, and the shriveling of resources.

This pray-er, though, does not blame God or theologize in any way about why this lot has befallen him (which would not change his actual situation anyway), nor does he bemoan his state of life, nor does he wail for better days to come. Rather, this saint celebrates what is not broken and can NEVER be severed, which is his connection with God.

He is held by Love and Mercy . . . and whatever his situation in life, that is enough.

Nevertheless . . .