Psalm 22:1-15

Pentecost +19 - Year B

Psalm 22:1-15

How many different ways can you say, “I’m not feeling well, my expectations have been dashed.” If you only have the F- or MF- or S-word available to you, you are not able to communicate the depth of your despair. Psalm 22 can add to your lexicon of descriptors of your woe. Just being able to bring so many different metaphors and similes to bear helps.

This is a case where expanding the expression of experience actually deepens the experience.

One of the interesting phenomena involved here is that using a multitude of images begins to build in such a way that by the time the Psalm ends (you’ll have to look it up) we shift gears and can see our situation from a different perspective - one that will help us move on rather than be stuck. This ability to use so many different allusions begins to cut through our initial illusion of being trapped in a particular circumstance. I can’t think of a better reason for expanding an imaginative use of experience descriptors than this - it is clarifying and healing. Building so many wonderfully concrete pictures begins to put a new picture in place. Literacy is liberating.

Here are two montages to illustrate the many descriptors giving new meaning to a one-dimensional picture:
Bush and Soldiers Killed in Iraq
Jesus and a Congregation