O LORD, you have searched me and known me.
2You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
3You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
4Even before a word is on my tongue,
O LORD, you know it completely.
5You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
6Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it.
7Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
8If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
9If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
10even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
11If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
12even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
The Psalmist sets a gold standard for poets who pray. Though there are more and less poetic translations of the Psalms, the elegance and strength, the longing and ebullient delight survive in most of them, and have enlivened the prayers of gathered congregations for centuries. Some seem made for public prayer: “O sing to the Lord a new song!” and “Why do the nations rage?” But many speak from the depths of a single awakened heart to a God who draws near, inclines an ear, dwells in secret places, and does not forsake us. For sheer beauty, I think Psalm 139 is unsurpassed. The first twelve verses complete an arc of praise that acknowledges with sure and certain awe who God is, how intimately present and yet how far beyond the measures of the mind.
Reciting God’s own attributes and acts is a curious thing to do in prayer. But as a reminder of who God is and who we are, recalling the ways that God is present to us helps us situate ourselves rightly before the One without whom there is nothing. The opening lines of the psalm let God know that I know that God knows all that is within me. “You have searched me and known me.” It is a paradoxical truth, both unsettling and reassuring. It dissolves any illusion I may harbor that I can keep my darkest secrets hidden or maintain my social respectability before God. Naked came I, and naked I stand before the Holy One.
There’s something touching in the attentiveness of a God who pays attention to when I sit down and when I rise up, and in the patience of a God who seeks me out and waits through the night, and who listens for words, knowing full well what I am likely to say. This God “hems me in”—hovering, touching, impinging, minding my business, supporting me even when I’m not aware I need it. The multiplication of active verbs in this canticle of amazement prevents us from flattening God into an idol or image or icon. We are not the actors or viewers, but the acted upon. The Psalmist worships not from an aesthetic distance, but from within the very heart of an embrace. Reciting the psalm, we become aware that we, too, are held and witnessed and accompanied and loved.
In verse 7 the tone becomes slightly darker: “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” The words are not comforting: the speaker imagines being pursued, found out, sought out, met and surprised and sometimes ambushed on his escape route. I find it hard to read these verses without remembering Francis Thompson’s strange, haunting, audacious poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” where God is likened to a hound seeking out the fugitive soul with dogged, unflagging persistence, trained to his purpose of pursuit and not to be swayed from it. It starts this way:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
The image of being pursued in this way isn’t entirely reassuring, even if it is by One who is finally identified as a “tremendous Lover.” Thompson knows, and the Psalmist knows, that the love of God is as fierce as it is tender.
My favorite lines of the psalm, and the ones that seem to me most mysterious and poetic, are these:
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
Even in our most desperate attempts at escape, we are led and held by the very One we seek to evade. The King James Version gives us the phrase “the uttermost parts of the sea.” When I learned that passage as a child, that place seemed far more remote and strange than “the farthest limits.” And “the wings of the morning” hardly bears comment, so sufficient is its mysterious beauty, except that it evokes the flight of a seabird soaring at dawn.
Remember, the Psalmist tells us, with an immediacy that dissolves the millennia between us, the unimaginable immanence of God. Remember how present God’s help is in time of trouble. Remember that you are held and guided, even as you wander and sink and flail. Remember that you cannot hide, that you will not be abandoned, and that, though it is “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” only there can you “lie down in peace and sleep” in the presence of the One who, alone, makes us dwell in safety.