A Time For Selah

“Selah.” – Psalm 3:2, 4, 8

This feels like a time of disorientation and isolation, with event cancellations happening to unprecedented degrees and in unprecedented ways. It feels destabilizing having things that I thought for sure would happen just disappear, not knowing what to expect next week or three months down the line.

We’re cycling back through the Psalms, and it struck me on this reading that Psalm 3 has the highest density of selah’s of any chapter in the book (the next three runner-ups are Psalms 32 and 46, which have 3 in 11 verses, and Psalm 67, which has 2 in 7 verses). No one knows for sure what selah means, though scholars guess “pause, silence.” It is a word that occurs not in the text itself, but as a notation in the margin. In a way, this entire time is like one big selah in our lives: a pause, a stop, an interruption from some force outside of the script of our lives.

Why are there more selah’s in this psalm than any other? David wrote it during an unexpectedly disruptive time in his life, when he was forced to abandon all routine in the face of a rebellion led by his son. Perhaps in this time of uncertainty, David felt an even greater need to stop and meditate on words like these: “But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head… I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me. I will not be afraid” (verses 3, 5-6). The word “sustain” here means “to lean upon, for rest and support.” David also says, “Arise, O Lord! Save me, O my God!” (verse 7). Times of instability can bring into greater relief both what we lean upon in our lives, and what the cry and longing of our souls are before God. 

But selah is also a reminder of the importance of community. Eugene Peterson writes in his book Answering God, “Like detectives sifting through the clues we find Selah; from it we deduce not a crime but a community… Some of [these psalms] most certainly originated in solitude, and all of them have been continued in solitude. But in the form in which they come to us, the only form in which they come to us, and therefore in the way they serve as our school of prayer, they are the prayers of a community before God in worship… Selah directed people who were together in prayer to do something or other together. Our prayer book, by the time we get our hands on it, has all these liturgical scribbles in the margins. Biblically, we are not provided with a single prayer for private devotions. The community in prayer, not the individuals in prayer, is basic and primary.”

David was not in a time of life when he could gather as he was accustomed to with his community. But nevertheless, they walk alongside him together (2 Samuel 15), and this little word in the margin is a reminder that, especially in times of disorientation and instability, our existence as a community has not changed. When we cannot meet as we usually do, how can we still pray in chorus together? How is this all an opportunity to rediscover what community truly means, what our faith truly means together? The time when David walked the unexpected path was the time he remembered more than any other that he was not really alone.