Psalms 22:1 Meaning My God

This cry belongs to the deepest point of the descent, the moment God, having become man completely, feels wholly cut off from himself. The despair carries a purpose. Here sounds the creative power sunk so far into human limitation that it has forgotten its own nature. The forsaking is the whole meaning of taking on flesh, going all the way down into the sense of being abandoned.

So the loneliest words in scripture describe a stage, not a defeat. The one who seems forsaken is the very power that chose the descent, buried now inside a man who does not yet know what he is. Every person who has felt utterly alone has stood at this exact place. That abandonment is God asleep in man, on the edge of waking to find he was never apart from himself.

Dukkha: Suffering Dukkha is the pressure in experience that no rearranging relieves. It takes a sharp form when help is asked for and silence comes back, since one of its plainest shapes is simply not getting what one wants. The plea goes up and nothing comes down, like calling into an empty house, and the weight sits precisely in that gap between the asking and the answer.

Piyavippayoga: Separation from what is dear Losing what is dear is one of the named forms of pain. "My God" comes twice before anything else is said, so the one who has gone far off is the one held closest, and that closeness is what makes the distance cut. An empty chair only aches at the table where someone always sat.

Salla: The dart Salla is the dart of pain, and the counting goes to two. The first is the affliction itself, the mockers and the thirst and the body coming apart; the second lands when the mind adds "forsaken," and being dropped by the one you trusted goes deeper than the injury. Anyone who hears this cry from a cross hears both wounds at once, and it is the second one that makes a sound.

Parideva: Lamentation Parideva is pain that has forced its way into speech. Groaning here has become words, and the question goes up twice, why and why, the way a person knocks again on a door that stayed shut. The wailing is unmuffled and unhidden, which is a kind of honesty: it is aimed at God rather than kept from God.

Saddhā: Trust Saddhā is confidence that keeps facing one direction. Even at the bottom, the address holds, "my God, my God," still my, so the complaint is being carried to the same place everything has always been carried. A child who feels abandoned still cries toward the parent, and where the cry is aimed tells you more than the words in it.