Discomforting consolations: Death and dying in the Psalter

Abstract

This article explores what the Psalms say about death and dying, as it relates to the themes of impermanence, nothingness, and darkness. These Psalms are a blunt rejection of death-denying contemporary mores and customs. As a pastor, I found the Psalms of death and dying, though at times discomforting, faithful companions alongside those who needed validation for their own entanglements with mortality and life’s fragility.

During the summer of my final year of seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, I worked as a full-time chaplain intern at a retirement and nursing care facility for senior adults. Residents ranged from independent and ambulatory to bedfast with cognitive impairments. Between my church pastorate and the work at the nursing care facility, death and dying was a daily part of my routines of ministry. Among my tools in working with residents and parishioners was a small, pocket-sized Bible. Inside its cover I had written notations of helpful references to scripture passages. I needed guidance as I sought to provide some measure of comfort and consolation when I was needed as pastor or chaplain.

Some of the references I noted were listed beneath the category titled “Winter Spirituality.” I gleaned this phrase from the book I was reading at the time by Martin E. Marty, A Cry of Absence: Reflections for the Winter of Heart. ¹ Thirty years have passed since that summer, but that little Bible, along with Marty’s meditations on the Psalms, has guided me through countless visits to hospitals, nursing homes, funerals, and sermons, where death, dying, and endless winters are part of the work of the minister, regardless the season.

The Psalms are frequently consulted for comfort and consolation in times of distress, death, and grief. A simple Internet search confirms that with “death” and “dying” and “the Psalms” in the search line, the results are overwhelmingly directed toward comfort, solace, and peace. The implication with such searches is that one turns to the Psalms to find reassurance in the face of death and grief and answers to theological questions of what happens after death. To be sure, finding comfort and consolation is common throughout the Psalter. But, as any student of the Psalms already knows, the Psalms are also populated with themes of lament and resignation, as well as confessions of life’s impermanence and the mystery and finality of death. Bioethicist Daniel Callahan offers the reminder, “We did not invent death, and we cannot make it disappear.” ²

Perhaps a more complete engagement of the Psalms is in order, in which death and dying are confronted and contended with. Honest questions need to be considered, beginning with what do the Psalms actually say about death and dying. Are the Psalms only intended to comfort and console, like the young chaplain intern cheerfully reminding residents, “The Lord is my shepherd?” ³ Or do the Psalms also confront the temporality and frailty of life, companioning the reader with a “winter spirituality”? ⁴

You have made my days a mere handbreadth;

 the span of my years is as nothing before you.

Everyone is but a breath,

 even those who seem secure. (Ps 39:5)

This article is concerned with exploring what the Psalms say about death and dying as it relates to the themes of impermanence, nothingness, and darkness. Death and dying is a “universal mortality” ⁵ ; therefore, what, if any, consolation can one find from the Psalter or its reader? Or is consolation even intended? Faithful attention to the Psalms of “discomforting consolations” will inevitably find places that will disquiet the reader, especially if one seeks tidy theological resolutions or solace in grief.

The remainder of the article offers some concluding thoughts of what this observation can mean for the reader of such Psalms. Specifically, what can be learned and what can be used in light of the discomforting consolations offered.

Death and impermanence

Those of low estate are but a breath;

 those of high estate are a delusion;

in the balances they go up;

 they are together lighter than a breath. (Ps. 62:9)

Throughout the Psalter are reminders that life is transitory and fleeting. Words such as “breath,” “vapor,” “sigh,” “shadow,” and “fade” or “fading” are used to speak to the brevity and impermanence of life and that death is certain for all life.

The author of Psalm 39 wants to know just how brief is one’s life, as in the number of days, acknowledging that the days are only a “few handbreadths,” and that the lifetime is “as nothing in your sight” (v. 5). Life is a “mere breath” and “like a shadow” (v. 6), and so the psalmist prays for peace as the “passing guest” who will “depart” and will be “no more” (v. 12). The psalm delivers powerful metaphors “for the insubstantiality of human life and effort.” ⁶ Even in Psalm 144, a psalm considered to be a shift from lament to confidence, ⁷ the author muses humans “are like a breath; their days are like a passing shadow” (v. 4).

In Psalm 62, the psalmist confesses singular fidelity to “God alone,” as the assault of oppressors and the spreading of falsehood presumably threatens to distract. Moving from confession to accusation and back to confession, the author reminds that whether of low or high estate, life is a breath and a “delusion” and “lighter than a breath” (v. 9).

In some psalms, life as transient and impermanent are a plaintive cry, lamenting life’s brevity. This expression is not far removed from Frederick Nietzsche’s thought experiment of eternal recurrence ⁸ or Milan Kundera’s expansion of the same idea in his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. ⁹

Life’s ephemerality might seem to generate occasions or motivations to live well in the present, but this idea is not always made explicit.

You turn us back to dust

 and say, “Turn back, you mortals.”

For a thousand years in your sight

 are like yesterday when it is past

 or like a watch in the night.

You sweep them away; they are like a dream,

 like grass that is renewed in the morning;

in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;

 in the evening it fades and withers. (Ps 90:3-6)

Here, the psalmist goes on to acknowledge that one’s years come to an end “like a sigh” (v. 9) and we “fly away” (v. 10). Observing all this, the reader is reminded to “count our days” for wisdom’s sake (v. 12).

Death and nothingness

For in death there is no remembrance of you;

in Sheol who can give you praise? (Ps 6:5)

In the Psalms, as well as throughout the Hebrew Bible, there is no systematic view of the afterlife, no consistent agreement of what, if anything, comes next. Instead, one reads as often about death as nothingness or a void or a chasm separating the dead from not only the living, but from God. Sheol was the location of the dead “where some believed that God was not present.” ¹⁰ Death as nothingness is a nihility, an antithesis to life. Death as “nothingness” in the Psalms is also, similar to Sheol, a way to speak of complete separation, that is, a separateness from life in all its forms and manifestations, as well as separateness from God. Nancy deClaissé-Walford notes that Sheol’s root means “to be extinguished . . . cut off from the very presence of God.” ¹¹

Although considered a Wisdom Psalm, Psalm 49 laments, “Their graves are their homes forever, their dwelling places to all generations, though they named lands their own” (v 11). Human wealth and power are bankrupt. Countering Psalm 23, in which the Lord is shepherd, Psalm 49 states, “Like sheep they are appointed for Sheol; Death shall be their shepherd; straight to the grave they descend, and their form shall waste away; Sheol shall be their home” (v. 14).

Death is dust, which is not necessarily nothing but is most certainly no longer living, breathing, or otherwise filling the earth and flourishing. ¹² The notion of death as a return to dust ¹³ echoes Genesis: “for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (3:19). In the Psalms, there is no creating or re-creating life out of dust. Instead, God “un-creates” as it were, and so it is professed, “when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust” (Ps 104:29).

Death and darkness

Is your steadfast love declared in the grave

 or your faithfulness in Abaddon?

Are your wonders known in the darkness

 or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness? (Ps 88:11-12)

The familiar KJV translation of Psalm 23 renders part of verse 4 “the valley of the shadow of death.” Many modern English translations translate the same verse as “the darkest valley.” Shadow and darkness bespeak death throughout the Psalms, perhaps none so dark as Psalms 88 and 89, the pair described as “the darkest place in the whole book of Psalms.” ¹⁴ Psalm 88 is viewed as a lament for one who is sick or near death, and metaphors describing death abound. The theme of darkness is foremost. ¹⁵ “Darkness becomes an anthropological space associated with the realm of the underworld.” ¹⁶ Sheol and darkness can be seen as parallels, where the wonders of God, the steadfastness of God - indeed, God - is absent. ¹⁷

Is there any succor with the Psalms of discomforting consolations?

As the student chaplain makes the rounds, with the worn pages of a little Bible in hand, what do the Psalms have to say to the aging, to the dying, and to all the rest of those who at some point will “walk through the darkest valley”? ¹⁸ Can any words of assurance and hope be found, or is it only discomforting consolations? Other Psalms can stand in as counterpoints. Psalm 139 is a contrast to Psalm 88, affirming that even in Sheol, “you are there” (v. 8), but the weight and nothingness of darkness in other Psalms cannot be denied.

This article is not intended to concern itself primarily with the pastoral care implications of death and dying in the Psalter, although the Psalms are often used when one is confronted with the finalities of life. Notably, I found, years ago as a student chaplain and for the next 30 years as a pastor, the Psalms of death and dying, though at times discomforting, also to be faithful companions alongside those who needed validation for their own entanglements with mortality and life’s fragility. To borrow words from a reviewer of Marty’s A Cry of Absence, many of the Psalms concerned with death, dying, and the dead are distinguished “by [their] stark intensity and [their] utter lack of cheap consoling rhetoric.” ¹⁹

While many of the Psalms of death and dying do not make for good memes or quotes for sympathy cards, they are honest engagements of life, death, and the One who “keeps” all things. These psalms are a blunt rejection of contemporary mores and customs that are often criticized as death-denying. Scholars such as Allen Verhey point to the middle of the twentieth century as the beginning of a culture both “obsessed with death and yet unwilling to mention it.” ²⁰ As such, death becomes taboo. It is barely acknowledged and mostly privatized. Now death is “medicalized,” removing it from families and communities. Phillippe Aires notes, “Neither the individual nor the community is strong enough to recognize the existence of death.” ²¹ For the psalms of discomforting consolations, death is not denied.

As societies, particularly Western ones, further ignore or distance death to the margins, existential anxiety is exacerbated, phobias are created, and meaningful conversations are neglected. Anthropologist Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for a book in which he argues,

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for [humankind]. ²²

Furthermore and notably, Carl Jung understood that the fear and denial of death creates any number of psychological, sociological, and spiritual neuroses:

And so it is—death is indeed a fearful piece of brutality; there is no sense pretending otherwise. It is brutal not only as a physical event, but far more psychically: a human being is torn away from us, and what remains is the icy stillness of death. ²³

The Psalms mentioned in this article, as well as others in the Psalter, speak loudly and clearly that death will not be silenced, indeed, cannot be silenced, let alone denied. To speak of death, with all its mystery, darkness, and uncertainty, is to acknowledge what is empirically true, even if existentially troubling. Physician and bioethicist L. S. Dugdale writes,

People who want to die well must be willing to confront their finitude . . . we must be prepared to say, “Yes, I am human and therefore mortal. One day I will die.” We cannot both cling to the indefinite extension of life and effectively prepare for death. ²⁴

And so psalms speak a reminder of our finitude; an example is Ps 90:3: You turn us back to dust and say, “Turn back, you mortals.”

Death and dying in the psalms is a validation and affirmation of what all humanity has shared since the very beginning: all things come to an end. “Death comes to all and cancels out all socio-economic stratification.” ²⁵ Therefore, while a responsible reading of the psalms concerned with death and dying is important, it is also important to remember that to neglect or avoid the reading of these same psalms is irresponsible. Quoting theologian John Bowker, Callahan includes death’s importance among the world religions:

The religious affirmation of value includes the reality of death, maybe as the last enemy, but also the necessary condition of life. Attempts to evade death, or to pretend that it is not serious, or to deny its necessary place in the ordering of life, have almost always been regarded by the major religious traditions as false or dangerous or subversive of truth. ²⁶

These Psalms of discomforting consolations may find fresh energy in movements sometimes called “death positive,” although the psalms themselves do not frame death as positive. Instead, what the psalms do, explicitly and implicitly, is invite the reader into community. Though death is particular, death is also communal. Callahan notes the seeming contradiction: “We must find our own meaning in death, and yet we cannot easily, if at all, do it alone.” ²⁷ The ancient words of the psalmist are spoken to particular communities in a particular time, as well as particular contexts, but they are also words spoken through the ages in synagogues, churches, and elsewhere.

The psalms of discomforting consolations also provide reminders that, because life is brief (a vapor, a breath, a sigh) and soon all will return to the mystery of the dust of our origin, one should live thoughtfully and in right relationship with others and with God. Trusting in wealth is futile. The same is true for power, at least power exerted by humans. Here again, deClaissé-Walford is helpful in her commentary on Psalm 49:

The reverence of the Lord is the path to wisdom and meaning in life, the message echoed by Jesus in Luke 12: “Do not keep striving for what you are to earth and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying . . . instead, strive for [God’s] kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well” (Luke 12:29, 31). ²⁸

While the psalms of discomforting consolations may not explicitly teach about dying well, one can infer from many of their verses that dying well means to live well. If meaning is to be gleaned from such psalms—and I believe it is—it is to live fully and faithfully. Marty muses that the pleading of such psalms was “not for a second life, but for meaning in this one. If God is God, these texts suggest, then there should be value already to our days as they pass.” ²⁹

Read and learn. Read and muse. Read and companion alongside everyone else whose days are numbered. Read and live. The words of D. W. Winnicott are a fitting conclusion here. He wrote, recorded in his journal in the last year of his life, “Oh God! May I be alive when I die.” ³⁰