There is something strange about Psalm 88, and the strangeness is on the page itself.
It does not resolve.
If you read the Psalter from beginning to end, you will notice a pattern. The laments — and there are many — almost always turn at some point. Somewhere in the middle, or near the end, the psalmist says but or yet or nevertheless, and the prayer pivots. But I trust in your unfailing love (Psalm 13:5). Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand (Psalm 73:23). Nevertheless, my soul, find rest in God; my hope comes from him (Psalm 62:5). The dark is real, but the dark is not the last word. The pivot is what makes the lament psalm a lament psalm. It is the small structural promise that even the worst prayers, in the end, find a way to yet.
Psalm 88 has no pivot.
It goes into the dark in verse one and stays there for eighteen verses. You have taken from me my closest friends and have made me repulsive to them. I am confined and cannot escape; my eyes are dim with grief (Psalm 88:8–9). Why, O Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me? (Psalm 88:14). And the last verse — the darkness is my closest friend. The Hebrew word for darkness, machshak, is literally the last word of the psalm. The song ends mid-cave. There is no candle.
This is the part most people miss. The editors of the Psalter knew this.
The darkness is real. The darkness is dark. And the canon contains a song that says so, without softening it.
They knew the formal expectation. They had compiled and arranged a hundred and fifty psalms, and they understood, better than anyone, that laments were supposed to turn. They could have edited Psalm 88. They could have appended a single closing verse — a yet, O Lord, I will hope in you — and the psalm would have read more comfortably for the next three thousand years. They did not.
They left it in the dark.
They left it because they believed, and this is the part the modern church has mostly lost, that the Bible was not only for the believer who had already made it out. It was also for the believer who had not. The believer for whom the yet had not yet come. The believer who, on a particular Tuesday, could not honestly say but I trust in your unfailing love — and needed a prayer that did not require them to say it.
Psalm 88 is that prayer.
It exists, in the canon, as God's permission for unresolved prayer.
If you are the believer in the dark right now, this is a strange and quiet gift, and we should sit with it.
It means you do not have to manufacture the pivot. The pivot is not the test of your faith. The faith is not contingent on your ability to produce, at the end of your prayer, the small redemptive turn that closes the lament neatly. Sometimes the prayer ends where the pain ends — which is to say, it does not end at all.
It means the Bible has a prayer for the day you cannot find the yet.
It means there is, in the Holy Spirit's own songbook, a song for the worship leader who can no longer sing the resolving songs. A song for the parent whose grief has not, in three years, lifted. A song for the chronically ill person who has stopped saying I know God will heal me because they no longer know that. A song for the believer who has been in the cave so long they have begun to wonder if the cave is now their address.
The song does not pretend.
It does not say the cave is not real. It does not say the cave is, when you look closely, actually a beautiful place. It does not say the cave will, by next Tuesday, lift. It says I am in the cave. The Lord put me here. I have been calling out and you have not answered. The darkness is my closest friend. And then it stops.
Three thousand years of God's people have read this psalm and said amen.
That is the witness available to you.
The pivot may come. Many believers, in the long run of their lives, find that the yet arrives — not always in the situation they were praying about, but in some other corner of their soul that has, slowly, learned to trust again. The lament psalms that do resolve give us the language for those days, and they are gifts.
But the days when the yet does not come are not lesser days. They are not days when faith has failed. They are days when faith looks like Psalm 88 — a prayer that keeps the address even when the prayer cannot find the resolution.
You are allowed to pray that prayer.
The canon is on your side.
The pivot may come. Until it does, the prayer that does not resolve is also a prayer.
Part 1: Darkness is my Closest Friend
Part 2: The Psalm that does not resolve
Part 3: The Anger that keeps Praying
Part 4: When the Community Steps Back
