God is our refuge and our stronghold,
a timely help in trouble.

So begin the familiar words of Psalm 46. The Psalmist is confident of God's help in all calamities, whether climatic or national. The first image suggests a gigantic earthquake with an accompanying storm at sea; the second a national emergency when the Holy City is attacked by vast enemy forces and all is set for disaster. It is probable that the writer had in mind the siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrian army under Sennacherib in 701 bc:

There is a river whose streams bring joy to the city of God,
the holy dwelling of the Most High;
God is in her midst; she will not be overthrown,
and at break of day he will help her.

In the psalms generally, dawn is the time of the divine favour whereas evening heralds the time of trial and suffering. And so the people of Israel can rest in the Lord's protection even when chaos reigns around them.

Come, see what the Lord has done,
the astounding deeds he has wrought on earth.

The writer exults in the power of the Almighty to end wars and destroy the weapons of battle. And so comes the celebrated tenth verse:

Let be then; learn that I am God.

The translation found in the Authorized Version is more poetic, "Be still, and know that I am God", but it seems to emphasize the divine indwelling in a way that is incompatible with the understanding of God that is typical of the Old Testament. The divine immanence is an article of faith of mystical religion; indeed it is faith that has been fertilized by knowledge. But the God of the Old Testament is severely transcendent, even when, as in the prophecy of Hosea, the Lord stands close to his people and weeps over their apostasies and longs to enfold them in the embrace of forgiveness. The more modern translation of this famous verse is apposite if less picturesque.

What the Psalmist is telling us is that we should relax in times of national no less than cosmic disaster, and put our trust in the Lord. This is not a shallow abdication of duty nor an abject admission of total impotence in the face of a present emergency. It is to be seen rather as a realistic appraisal of the situation and a giving of ourself in dark faith to God, to do as he shows us instead of becoming stricken with panic and thus adding our quota to the prevailing confusion. This lesson is of universal application, being as appropriate in personal strife as in national upheaval.

Psalm 37, in which the fates of the virtuous and the wicked are compared in the rather cut and dried manner of the early Wisdom literature enunciates a similar doctrine in the seventh verse:

Wait quietly for the Lord, be patient till he comes:
do not envy those who gain their ends,
or be vexed at their success.

This verse has again been translated more poetically in the Authorized Version:

Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him:
fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way,
because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass.

Waiting quietly perhaps does not have that sense of complete submission that rest might imply, but it reminds us that we too have to play our part. An inert type of rest can easily degenerate into frank sloth - leaving it all to God. But if we wait in alert patience, we will know what to do both immediately and in that future moment when direct action is required.

Returning to Psalm 46, we learn about God by considering his works in creation. As St Paul says in Romans 1:19-20, all that can be known of God lies open to our unclouded intellect in surveying the created order around us. On the other hand we know God by an act of union with him. This comes by divine grace, a totally unmerited gift from God to his rational creature, and we are, as it were, taken up into the presence of our Lord, there to be enwrapped in a light too powerful to be borne by earthly eyes and a love so intense that no part of our being is exempted from its embrace. The result of this completely unexpected infusion of the divine grace is that we become changed creatures, remade, albeit ever so slightly, in the image of God which was our original stature in the divine mind, and is, through Christ, to become our final end. This intimate knowledge of God is prefigured in the perfect union of the holy spouses of antiquity, which gave birth to children of promise: Isaac, Samson, Samuel and John the Baptist. It is improbable that the Psalmist had any such thought when he wrote Psalm 46.

Nevertheless an appreciation of the divine indwelling in the soul of all of us can add a fresh dimension of truth to the Psalmist's inspiration. The city mentioned in the fourth verse is even more pertinently our own soul than holy Jerusalem itself, and the divine presence is within it. The river whose streams bring it joy is the Holy Spirit with its overflowing power. We recall the lovely meeting of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well described in the fourth chapter of St John's Gospel. Jesus compares the water from the well that quenches human thirst for only a little while with the water he can give. This is as a spring of water within us that wells up and brings eternal life. The simple woman can envisage this water in material terms only, but Jesus hints that a renewed style of living is first required before the great inner transformation can occur. The time will come when true worship is quite independent of locality but is an inner offering to God from the soul: God is spirit, and he must be worshipped in spirit and in truth. When one is truly still, one is made aware of the divine presence within; when one lets be and does not interfere with matters or proceed to do anything, the inner silence, perhaps appreciated for the first time in one's life, leads one to the still, small voice within that is the source of eternal wisdom. And then one can start to do what ought to be done rather than what one would like to have done.

In his teaching on prayer Jesus tells us to go into a private room with shut doors. There we know God in the secret place, and he can be fully accessible to us, so that a conversation of great meaning can take place (Matt. 6:6). He goes on to remind us that we do not need elaborate words but rather quiet listening, for our Father already knows what we need. The Lord's Prayer which follows, with its familiar clauses, is designed to show us what we need essentially for immediate health and eternal sustenance. First there is a lifting up of our eyes to God in his majesty and then a heartfelt desire that God's kingdom may come on earth also. We then pray for our immediate material needs - a day's supply is enough at a time lest we become so preoccupied with mundane things that we overlook our spiritual work. After this we remember our deeper condition, needing both forgiveness and the capacity to pardon those who have hurt us. Finally comes the conflict with evil; the devil (however we may picture this malign principle) will tempt us to put our Creator to the test, as he did Jesus in the three temptations in the wilderness that inaugurated his great ministry after his baptism. The tendency to use God for our own ends, no matter how laudable these may appear, is a constant hazard of the spiritual life. Once we use God in this proprietorial way, we lie fully open to the assaults of evil influences. We need the ever-present divine assistance to direct our eyes away from ourself to the mystery of God himself in constant prayer, worship and service. It is thus that we are delivered from the evil one. The optional doxology at the end has the virtue of bringing us finally in praise of the divine glory.

All this inner dialogue goes on in the depth of the soul, aptly compared with a private room whose doors are shut. If the doors are left open, the conversation will be interrupted by the various thoughts that usually stream through the mind, inducing vague anxiety that shows itself in a worrying that simply interferes with the smooth conduct of praying, as it does also the outer tenor of our life. Since God knows our needs before we ask for help, is it sensible to commend them to him? The answer is emphatically in the affirmative, for when we speak directly, whether aloud or in mental discourse, we focus our problems in the divine presence, and, once we are able to be quiet and listen, we will learn many truths, thereby finding surprising answers to our manifold problems. God meets us on our own level, and, provided we are willing, will lead us to his holy habitation, the heavenly form on which the Holy City is modelled. Thus Moses was told to work to the design he had been shown on Mount Sinai (Exod. 25:40). When, like Moses, we are lifted up to God, our attention is riveted on his presence, and the door of the soul is effectively shut to all distraction. It may need an impending calamity of the type mentioned in Psalm 46 to bring us to such a complete submission to God's presence, so that we may at last see the truth of our situation and the means of our healing.

When one thinks of Psalm 46 on an historical level, one cannot help recalling that the confidence the writer had in God's overall protection of Holy Zion in the face of the remarkable retreat of the Assyrian forces at the very gates of Jerusalem was not to be confirmed later on. About a century later the city and its Temple were to be destroyed by the Babylonians. The Israelites were so confident about the inviolability of these places that they presumed on the automatic protection of God despite their continual apostasies. Jeremiah had warned them about the error of assuming the Temple could not be destroyed (Jer. 7:1-7). Only an amended way of life would ensure the survival of the country, but this message they would not heed. One can learn from this that the time of total reliance upon God is short, indeed bounded entirely by the period of emergency. But once this has lifted, active co-operation with the divine presence is necessary. It was the survivors of the Babylonian exile who showed this understanding in their lives as they proceeded painfully to rebuild the Temple and repair the city walls. If we do not work constructively with the law of life, we shall soon be destroyed. There is a time for patient retrenchment, but this is succeeded by active outflowing in the Spirit of God. It is one thing to rely on the divine assistance, but quite another to take that help for granted. The first is an active co-operation, the second a negligent acceptance with neither gratitude nor commitment to future work for the Kingdom.

The situation mirrored in Psalm 13 is a more personal affliction in the face of persistent attacks by the writer's enemies. He asks how long God will leave him forgotten, hiding, as it were, his face from him, while his soul is in anguish and grief overwhelms his heart. He beseeches God to respond to his suffering lest his adversaries gloat over him. But then comes the answer that is repeated by the Psalmist:

As for me, I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart will rejoice when I am brought to safety.
I shall sing to the Lord, for he has granted all my desire.

This seems to be something more than mere hope welling up in his heart, simply wishful thinking. There is a direct message to the mind from the depth of the soul, in whose most sacred point, which we may call the spirit, the divine presence lies immanent. As we have already noted, such a view about God is basically alien to the Old Testament - and to many ardent theists also, who see the human being as too corrupt by virtue of "original sin" to have any innate communication with God - and yet it cannot be suppressed in the writer's personal experience, no matter how he may choose to disguise or disown it. The psalm has a glorious trust about it; in his mind the writer can already envisage relief. This is an example of hope made real by faith, whose end is positive action initiated by God and effected by the human. Another way of putting this observation is that of Hebrews 11:1: faith gives substance to our hopes and convinces us of realities we do not see. At the right time that "substance", that tangible proof in the world of matter, will show itself in remarkable events around us.

At the time of writing, one cannot but look in amazement at the changed political situation in Eastern Europe, where, without force of arms, freedom has dawned for vast populations whose lives would have seemed to be indefinitely encompassed by ideological dogmatism and international isolation. Trust and prayer over the decades have worked to change human awareness; discernment is now what is most required.

Psalm 103, one of the loveliest of the 150, is a hymn of praise to God's love even in the midst of human dereliction. It is a glorious psalm to repeat when all seems to be going wrong, and life itself is a mockery, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", as Shakespeare puts it in Macbeth. When we have borne the full impact of our trial, silence may at last take the stage, as it did when the debate between Job and his friends ended on a note of human futility and intellectual impotence. Then at last we are drawn to the basic issues of our existence: the privilege of life, the glory of humanity and the amazing gift of being able to know God in intimate communion and to trace his ways in investigating the many prodigies of nature. To lose ourself in the marvel of creation is the way to freeing ourself of the present anguish with its threat of future chaos. Indeed, how easy it is to succumb to our own affliction when we could call so easily on the God of love for immediate relief and later healing!

Bless the Lord, my soul;
with all my being I bless his holy name.
Bless the Lord, my soul,
and forget none of his benefits.
He pardons all my wrongdoing
and heals all my ills.

The Psalmist revels in describing the divine mercy and compassion. His patience is as unceasing as his faithfulness, his leniency is a measure of his great love for his erring rational creature, the human being.

As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we were made;
he remembers that we are but dust.

The fear that is such an integral part of the Wisdom literature of the Bible is a deep respect for God and all he has made. It is a compound of awe in the face of the tremendous mystery underlying creation and a deep concern for the well-being and maintenance of all that has been created. When Moses encountered God in the burning bush, he was told not to come near and to take off his sandals, for he was standing on holy ground. Moses hid his face, being afraid to look on God (Exod. 3:2-6): Though the Almighty dwarfed Moses and could have destroyed him in a trice, instead he told him to come close to him on the holy ground. He was to remove his footwear, a symbol of earthly possessions, and enter fully into physical as well as spiritual communion with his Creator. This account gives us some idea of awe before God and the marvellous downpouring of his grace upon his obedient creature.

With great poignancy the Psalmist contrasts human transience with the everlasting love of God. The words about the human condition are especially striking, and account in part for the frequent use of this psalm at funeral and thanksgiving services:

The days of a mortal are as grass;
he blossoms like a wild flower in the meadow:
a wind passes over him, and he is gone,
and his place knows him no more.

Indeed when we remember how frantically our friends strove for their living, their families and their reputations, how proud they were of their possessions, how quick to become angry at even small reverses of fortune, we can only smile indulgently at the evanescence of human endeavour in face of the great mystery.

The unlimited, unconditional love expressed in Psalm 103 makes it an apt prefiguration both of St John's teaching in 1 John 3 and 4:7-21, and that of Christ the incarnate Word himself. He too underwent the painful death of a human, and within a few days he would have been equally forgotten had he not risen from the dead and revealed a completely new pattern of existence to his amazed disciples, and through them to the whole world.

When we are deeply in trouble and no rational solution seems acceptable, we may indeed call upon the Lord, using whatever name seems fit to us. The subsequent strengthening will fill us, of whatever traditional background, with the resolve to go steadfastly onward looking towards the light ahead of us. As Jesus warned his followers, no one setting his hand to the plough and then looking back is fit for God's kingdom (Luke 9:62).

Psalm 103 also reminds us of the indivisible fellowship of all God's creatures:

Bless the Lord, you his angels,
mighty in power, who do his bidding
and obey his command.
Bless the Lord, all you his hosts,
his ministers who do his will.
Bless the Lord, all created things,
everywhere in his dominion.
Bless the Lord, my soul.

We work with the immense ministry of angels and the glorious Communion of Saints for the coming of God's kingdom on earth. The saints too knew their times of trouble when they lived among us.