NOTES for Psa 142

Everyone at least a little familiar with spiritual life knows such definitions of spiritual states as "dryness" and something opposite to this dryness, for which no unambiguous definition has been invented, because in spiritual life the negative is generally much more understandable to us than the positive. It is no accident that it is so easy for us to speak about sin and the struggle with it, and so difficult to speak about grace and high spiritual feats: words for the former are easy to find in our language; for the latter they are very difficult.

So it is for the hymnographer: he defines his present state with the word "dryness," speaking of a "dry soul," while he does not undertake to define unambiguously what he is striving for, saying only that he needs God as dry steppe land needs the moisture of rain. What then is this dryness? Where does it come from?

In this case, of course, the issue is a person who lives a full spiritual life and strives to walk the path of righteousness. The path of righteousness presupposes, first, relationships with God, without which no spiritual life is possible at all, and second, observance of the Torah, the laws and commandments given by God, without whose observance there can be no normal relationships with God.

A person living a full spiritual life considers it necessary for himself to observe the Torah always and in every case; meanwhile fallen human nature, corrupted by the fall, resists this in every way, not only on the spiritual level, but on all the others too. This struggle of a person with himself, so well described in particular by Paul in his letters, sometimes completely distracts a person from God, shifting the main focus of attention of the one seeking the righteous path from God to himself, so that the center of the person's attention becomes not God, but his own humanity corrupted by sin.

Concentration on one's own sins, when opposition to them becomes, perhaps imperceptibly for the person himself, an end in itself, distorts the person's relationship with God: normal relationships with Him are possible only when He Himself is at the center, not what helps or, on the contrary, hinders relationships with Him. Once attention is focused not on Him, but on anything else, even something connected with Him, normal spiritual life is over.

Then a person experiences dryness, as a lack of that divine life, that life-giving breath, whose acquisition is the goal and meaning of spiritual life, without which the path of righteousness is impossible and even the very observance of the commandments loses meaning. And the hymnographer seeks this breath, asks God for what he cannot live without, without which his life loses all meaning.

The psalmist cries out for the Lord to hear him according to His righteousness, although he himself understands that if He truly judges according to righteousness, no one will be able to justify himself before Him. But why appeal to righteousness when you understand in advance that you will not withstand it?

The very fact that we trust God and want to follow His commandments means that we are interested in knowing about ourselves the truth that He will reveal to us. And although we have already learned that the Lord is merciful and that His judgment is not formal and superficial, as human judgment often is, nevertheless, before asking Him for mercy, we must obtain a sober view of ourselves and of the things we so often get up to. To understand and feel all this properly, it can be useful to see how our actions, so familiar to us, look from the outside. And then we are appalled.

But the Lord, unlike people, not only allows us to be appalled; He also saves us. He saves us from what distorts us, but what we often quite wrongly regard as an inseparable part of ourselves.