Krista Mournet

As I prepare to start my second year as a PhD student in Theology at Durham University in the UK (part-time, I still live in the US), I am finding all kinds of exciting avenues of research. This evening I came across an article on Psalm 90; Samuel E. Balentine’s “Turn O Lord! How Long?” (Review and Expositor, 100, Summer 2003). The article introduces a conversation around a dangerous question; “Does God repent?” and even more dangerous; “Should we ask Him to?”

Well, the Psalmist does…several times…it’s a key feature in the Psalms, in fact. Balentine weaves rabbinical stories, poetry, fiction, and prose (from one of my favorite authors, Kathleen Norris) in his fascinating treatment of this Psalm.

What I want to focus on is a closing question of his:

“We seem to have settled, like [Wendell] Berry’s fictional preacher, Brother Preston, for truths that connect us to the ‘hereafter’ but sever us from the grief and despair of the ‘here and now.’ Sadly, such ministry leaves far too many unaddressed, uncomforted.” And later; “Who will stand before God and say, ‘Turn, O Lord! How long?’ Such questions, of course, only beg another; who knows how God will respond to those who do so?”

Balentine closes his article with a poem by R. S. Thomas, “Threshold,” which beautifully describes the craggy edge of the precipice between the safe and the dangerous; between the silence and the question–how long?

I emerge from the mind’s
cave into the worse darkness
outside, where things pass and
the Lord is none of them.

I have heard the still small voice
and it was that of the bacteria
demolishing my cosmos. I
have lingered too long on

this threshold, but where can I go?
To look back is to lose the soul
I was leading upwards towards
the light. To look forward? Ah,

what balance is needed at
the edges of an abyss.
I am alone on the surface
of a turning planet. What

to do but, like Michelangelo’s
Adam, put my hand
out into unknown space,
hoping for the reciprocating touch?
R. S. Thomas, “Threshold,” Poems of R. S. Thomas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1985), 149-150.