Sunday Reflection: Then Shall I be Satisfied

As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness. – Psalm 17:15

Being unwell and cloudy in mind, I am bogged down in the roiling sadness of Ezekiel and I cannot pick out one word of God from another. In moments like these I try to remember what is the point of the bible, and whether a person like me can ever begin to understand it, and I devolve back to the Prayer of Jonah (O God, Help Me) which continues to be the substance of all my prayers.

But there is another place to flee, in the bible, besides the depths of Jonah’s salvific leviathan, and that is always Psalm 17:15. It isn’t so much a prayer as a consoling announcement.

And, being an announcement, or a delcraration, it doesn’t have to be confused with a command. It’s not something that you have to do, else, you would be worse off than before. You can’t say, ‘I shall do whatever it takes to behold your face in righteousness’ because even if you managed not to be entirely evil, you still wouldn’t be righteous, and there’s no way you would therefore be able to behold God’s face. No, it’s not a command. It’s a descriptive harkening to a future day.

A day that can’t come until you are in the grip and mire of Sheol’s death–what Paul and others call ‘Sleep’, but which to us might, at least some of the time, seem rather terrifying. I don’t expect just to go to sleep and wake up beholding the face of God. I expect to be miserable and clinging to this life and possibly panicky, who knows. But that’s not what the psalmist expects. He will just go to sleep, and awake.

And when he awakes, he will be satisfied with, he says to God, your likeness. We are said to have been made in the image and likeness of God, and when we are not distracting ourselves with everything, we sometimes wonder in what way that likeness is expressed. Some say it’s human intelligence, others say feelings and emotions. Others say it’s our capacity to love. I don’t think it matters, because ever since that first likeness was taken, was written in the dust, we have been trying to  obscure it any way we can. Rather than being in the image and likeness of God, we have tried to make God over to be like us. And the result of this exchange is always dissatisfaction.

Ask me how I know about dissatisfaction. And I will admit, confess even, that the moment I have got everything put right, or been given something I was sure I wanted, I am satisfied only for a few minutes before the great distressing anxiety for something more begins to creep in. We can fight very hard against this, but we cannot win, in this life, just like we cannot be righteous.

That is why we must look ahead, we must keep the inner eye fixed on the glory to come, and look forward even to going to sleep. Observe the certainty and confidence of the psalmist. He isn’t wondering. He isn’t hoping for the best. He knows that at some future point, when the worst possible thing that a human person most fears happens, death, that that single moment will be the greatest moment. He will behold the face of God, and it will be enough, finally. There won’t be any longing for anything more.

And that being so, there can be glimpses of it being enough now. There can be some moments of singular satisfaction, of finding that God is enough in each morning that you wake from a less catastrophic sleep.