Out of the Depths I Cry to You

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications! (Psalm 130:1-2)

There is something all too familiar about the images of Silda Wall Spitzer standing by her disgraced husband’s side. I have seen that haggard look elsewhere.

In the mirror.

It is a look that can speak of unexpected upheaval or tired desperation, of sudden shocks or long tortuous battles. It is the look of someone who is losing a child to mental illness, who cannot escape the clutches of depression, who has been ground down by life’s vicissitudes…who, like Silda, has suddenly found a productive life destroyed by a tragedy in the classic sense.

If you’ve lived any length of time, you’ve probably seen that look in the mirror too.

It often comes with a complete loss of perspective. (I would suggest Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking for a vivid depiction of this.) Accomplishing the simplest tasks can be impossible. One moves as through water, or rapidly curing concrete. Suddenly it is easy to understand the emotional wallop in the first two verses of the de profundis (quoted above), which we often pray to commemorate the dead.

What can we say to faces like these? What can we say when the faces are ours?

I don’t know that there’s a clear way forward. The typical platitudes are rarely comforting, whatever seeds of truth they contain. The silent, listening presence of others can bear much fruit; sometimes, however, they might be blessed with just the right thing to say, and silence would be counterproductive. Certainly there is no way around the distress; there is only the way through.

Faith rarely makes the distress go away quickly. But it does have two words to speak. One involves psalms like the de profundis. If we can cry to God so desperately—if we are free to scream at God as the psalmist does—it makes faith a safe space in which to grieve. Before God, we can let everything out and slowly, slowly, work our way through.

The other word will be spoken next week, during the Christian Holy Week, when we commemorate the brutal torture and death that Jesus endured. God may not magically set things right, but in the person of Jesus, God has worn this face.

Sometimes clinging to these words is all we can do when that face confronts us in the mirror.