A Time for Cursing Psalms

"Job" (bronze, 1945), by Ivan Meštrović. Installed at Syracuse University

When Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists attacked multiple targets in the USA on Sept 11, 2001, there was a uniform feeling among Americans of shock (mixed, of course with many other things). That day, students and faculty gathered spontaneously in the chapel to grieve and console each other. I, too came to the gathering, but I had something else on my mind. I had been assigned to speak in chapel the next day. I had already thought to talk about the “difficult” psalms, but that day the need to lift up the cursing psalms became clear.

And now, with the invasion of Ukraine, shock and horror have returned and the cursing psalms have their relevance renewed. In these days of renewed war in Europe, what shall we do with our sorrow, our despair, and our anger at such naked aggression, mass slaughter, and soulless calculation for war? I know I should have felt just as outraged for other things, but guilt for that cannot diminish my outrage at this one.

This too is a time for cursing psalms, both for the obvious reason that it gives voice to righteous anger and also because it might help us look at that anger more closely. Poetry gives us words for our unspoken, and unspeakable, feelings.

As a warmup exercise for a real cursing psalm, I recommend psalm 88. It is a psalm of complaint, and I commend this psalm to you also today.  Here are the last few verses:

Your blazing anger has swept over me
Your terrors have destroyed me
They surround me all day long like a flood
They encompass me on every side
My friend and my neighbor you have put away from me
And darkness is my only companion

If today you feel you, or your friends and family, or other innocent people, have no refuge this psalm does not offer you comfort.  But it does voice your complaint.  But even in the darkness, the psalmist is not silent or alone.  The psalm is a complaint to God.  TO god.  ABOUT god.  "Why have you rejected me?  Will you do wonders for the dead?"  The psalmist brings the horror of the day, the despair, the numbing shock, brings it all to God.  Not in meek submission or naive trust, but in angry accusation.  "Why have you rejected me?"  There is no comfort here, but there is anger – articulate, intense, accusing. And it remains in touch with God, in dialogue, expecting an answer.

We can find anger in the real cursing Psalms, not at God, but at the psalmist's enemies; and also dialogue with God that the enemies have not yet been defeated, shamed, and accursed. 

It starts with a plea to God because of the psalmist's predicament.  Even though the psalmist loves and prays for these people, still they curse him.  So, what is the psalmist's response?  Certainly not to "make prayer" for these folks again.  But instead to make a prayer against them, in fact, a curse, or, if you will, a counter-curse.  Hold on to your seat, for here it is, Psalm 109, 6-15:

Appoint a wicked man against him; let an accuser stand on his right.
When he is tried, let him be found guilty; let his prayer be counted as sin.
May his days be few; may another seize his position.
May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow.
May his children wander about and beg; may they be driven out of the ruins they inhabit.
May the creditor seize all that he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his toil.
May there be no one to do him a kindness, nor anyone to pity his orphaned children.
May his posterity be cut off; may his name be blotted out in the second generation.
May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the LORD, and do not let the sin of his mother be blotted out.
Let them be before the LORD continually, and may his memory be cut off from the earth.

There is more, but those are the highlights.  Here certainly is scripture with muscle.  Whatever his sins, this person has been well and fully cursed.  I used to curse people and things when I was a construction worker, and do still on occasion, but never with this all-encompassing, blazing, carefully meditated, revised and targeted, intelligent, highly competent, wrath. 

I was first introduced to the cursing psalms by a visit to a convent in Seattle, where I heard Benedictine nuns praying, with sweet, elderly voices, a psalm of cursing on their enemies.  It was chilling.  Here were what seemed to me at the time sweet little old ladies (I learned later they were much more than that).  But here they were praying that their enemies be made food for jackals. I asked "how do you do it?"  They assured me they were not praying for the death, annihilation, and shame of their enemies to the second generation. But they were obligated to pray all of the psalms, and each sister approached these difficult ones in her own way.  I would have to find my own way, too, if I took up their practice. 

As I took up my practice, one thing I found is that these psalms are so finely tuned in their anger or despair that they call those very emotions out in me.  I might not think I am angry, or might think it impolitic to admit I am angry, or be too proud to admit my anger.  And, it fact, it may worry you when I admit to this, but when I recite the psalms of cursing in prayer, I cannot help but have some people jump to mind.  Today, we can easily guess who jumps to my mind.  And so, my prayer shows me my hidden (or sometime not so hidden) anger.  It gets it out so I can see it in the middle of my prayer practice, in dialogue with God.

In these days, I encourage you also to take up this practice. Perhaps we can pray together in sadness or in anger and ask that justice be done. And hope that mercy may be found.

We can hold this contradiction in our corporate hands and bring all of our humanity, and all of humanity, before the throne of mercy.

Or perhaps if you have skills in writing, you could write a cursing psalm appropriate for these times and circumstances. If you do, share it with us. And also share your thoughts, even the less charitable ones, here among us.