“When I kept silent,
my bones wasted away through my
groaning all day long”
I’m not sure I know why myself—and I’m not sure I want to
know—but one of the first novels I read that simply wouldn’t exit the chambers
of my heart was Alan Paton’s Too Late the
Phalarope, a novel of sin and self-righteousness, set in apartheid South
Africa. The pulsating portrayal of
Pieter van Vlaanderin’s guilt simply wouldn’t let me alone. I became him—like I said, I don’t know why.
Van Vlaanderin, a police officer sworn to uphold laws which
keep races apart, has sexual relations with a black woman. His marriage is cold and stultifying, but he
knows very well that his sin is not his wife’s fault. In the face of his own overwhelming desire,
he falls. But he doesn’t get away with
it, and the truth comes out.
The real horror of the story, however, is his inability to
find forgiveness. The sorrow in his
heart just won’t go away.
Too Late the Phalarope
put me through agonies more terrifying than any I’d ever undergone myself when,
as an undergraduate, I read the novel. When
van Vlaanderin kept silent, his bones wasted away through his groaning all day
long, and so did mine. Reading the novel
was excruciating, and that’s why it was so memorable.
And that’s why, perhaps, Too
Late the Phalarope comes to mind when I read the third verse of Psalm
32: I can’t help thinking of the
bone-wasting agonies of Pieter van Vlaanderin, a man from supposedly God-fearing
family who couldn’t find forgiveness.
Post Bathsheeba, David’s bones shook with horror and guilt
at what he’d done. We know that’s true,
after all, from Psalm 51. “My sin is
always before me,” David says, after Nathan let him know the truth. Full of
misery, David asks the Lord for forgiveness: “Let the bones you have crushed
rejoice.”
Some scholars speculate that Psalm 32 should really be Psalm
52. The 32nd Psalm seems,
after all, a kind of retrospective poem David might have written to explain
exactly what happened when finally he found the forgiveness he was looking for
in Psalm 51. “This is how it went,” he
seems to say. Then he explains how it
was that he acknowledged his sin and confessed. David’s songs—both 32 and 52—record the
reality of God’s forgiveness only because they first acknowledge the reality of
his sin, or so it seems to me.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Psalm 32 begins in defining blessedness as the condition of the
forgiven, the state of mind and soul of those who know that every last inch of
the blackened corners of their hearts have been scoured, those who don’t try to
cover things, those who conceal nothing from the watchful eyes of God—as if
they could.
I sometimes wonder whether those who confess faith in God
can really know his grace if they haven’t known their own sin, if they haven’t
felt the groaning of their bones, as David says, if they haven’t felt something
of to the horror that Pieter van Vlaanderin knew—as did David.
Answer me this: how
can anyone know grace without knowing sin?
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