Catholic Commentary
Anguished Questions of Abandonment
7“Will the Lord reject us forever? Will he be favorable no more?8Has his loving kindness vanished forever? Does his promise fail for generations?9Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he, in anger, withheld his compassion?” Selah.
Psalms 77:7–9 presents three anguished questions about God's apparent abandonment: whether the Lord will reject his people forever, whether his covenantal mercy has vanished, and whether he has forgotten his gracious nature. These interrogative statements, suspended without immediate answers, paradoxically maintain the psalmist's relationship with God by keeping him accountable to the covenant rather than collapsing into despair.
In the darkness of spiritual abandonment, the Psalmist does not curse God—he interrogates him, and that brutal honesty is the truest form of faith.
Psalms 77:7 — "Will the Lord reject us forever?" The Hebrew verb zānach (reject, spurn, cast off) carries the force of a deliberate, sovereign act of repudiation — the kind of abandonment one might show an unfaithful vassal or a broken vessel. The Psalmist does not merely feel forgotten; he feels thrown away. The word "forever" (Hebrew: le'olam) is the existential wound beneath the question: it is not only that God is silent now, but that the silence might be the permanent shape of reality going forward. Yet the verse is grammatically a question, not a declaration — and this distinction is everything. The Psalmist has not concluded God has rejected him; he is interrogating the possibility with raw honesty. In the broader context of Psalm 77, this comes after verses 1–6 establish the night of sleepless weeping and the failure of all earthly consolation. The question is the hinge point of the psalm, where lament begins its turn toward memory and trust (cf. vv. 11–20).
Psalms 77:8 — "Has his loving kindness vanished forever?" The word translated "loving kindness" is the Hebrew ḥesed — arguably the most theologically dense word in the Old Testament. Ḥesed is covenantal mercy, the faithful, steadfast love that defines YHWH's character and his bond with Israel. It is not mere sentiment but a covenantal obligation flowing from God's own nature. The Psalmist's terror here is not just personal — it is covenantal. If ḥesed has "ceased" (gāmar, ended, been completed, run out), then the covenant itself may have expired. The phrase echoes Lamentations 3:22 in reverse: "The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases" — but in Psalm 77, that certainty is precisely what is in crisis. The faithful reader is meant to feel the vertigo of that inversion. The verb gāmar is particularly stark: it suggests not just absence but exhaustion, as if God's mercy were a finite reservoir now drained dry.
Psalms 77:9 — "Has God forgotten to be gracious?" Two verbs stand in painful juxtaposition here: shākaḥ (to forget) and the noun ḥannōt (to be gracious, to show ḥēn). The idea that God could "forget" to exercise his most essential attribute — his grace — borders on theological crisis. This is the most intimate of the three questions: rejection (v. 7) is relational, the disappearance of ḥesed (v. 8) is covenantal, but forgetting to be gracious (v. 9) touches God's very nature. The Psalmist then adds: "Has he in anger shut up his compassion?" — raḥamîm, the bowel-deep compassion cognate with reḥem (womb), divine maternal tenderness. The image of God's compassion being shut up or locked away by wrath makes the desolation visceral and total.
Spiritual Sense — Typological and Anagogical The Church Fathers, particularly St. Augustine in his Expositions on the Psalms, read Psalm 77 as the voice of the Church and of Christ himself — the totus Christus (whole Christ, Head and Body) — crying from within the human condition. The three questions thus become the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane and on the cross ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"), and simultaneously the prayer of every soul passing through spiritual desolation. Origen noted that such questioning is not faithlessness but rather an elevated form of prayer — it presupposes that God exists, that he can answer, and that the relationship is real enough to sustain the assault of honest grief.
From a Catholic perspective, these three verses are a masterclass in the theology of desolation — a theme developed richly in the mystical tradition and given magisterial contour in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
The Legitimacy of Lament. The CCC §2559 teaches that prayer is "the raising of one's mind and heart to God." Crucially, this includes the heart's anguished questions. St. John Paul II, in Salvifici Doloris (1984), wrote that human suffering "seems to threaten" the very logic of God's love — and that this questioning, when addressed to God rather than against him, becomes a participation in the redemptive mystery of Christ. The three questions of Psalm 77:7–9 are not the words of an atheist but of a believer who refuses to let go of God even while demanding an account.
The Dark Night and Persevering Faith. St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila both identified the noche oscura — the dark night of the soul — as a purifying grace, not a sign of abandonment. St. Thérèse of Lisieux, in her final illness, experienced precisely the anguish of these verses and recorded it in Story of a Soul: "The thought of heaven... is now nothing but a cause of struggle and torment." Yet she persevered in trust, as the Psalmist ultimately does in verses 11–20. The CCC §164 acknowledges that faith must pass through "the dark night of faith," and these verses are its scriptural locus classicus.
Divine Immutability and Hesed. Catholic theology, following Aquinas (ST I, q.9), insists that God cannot change — his ḥesed cannot literally be "exhausted." The questions of verses 8–9 are therefore not answered with silence but ultimately with the revelation of divine constancy. The Catechism (§212) cites God's self-revelation as "I AM" as the basis for trust that God's mercy is never truly absent. The desolation is real; the abandonment is not.
Contemporary Catholics often feel pressure to keep their prayer "positive" — to suppress doubt, mask spiritual dryness, or perform certainty they do not feel. Psalm 77:7–9 gives direct permission to do otherwise. When a long illness, a broken marriage, a child lost to the faith, or simply years of unanswered prayer produce genuine spiritual desolation, these three questions are not a failure of faith — they are its most honest form.
Practically, a Catholic in desolation can pray these verses literally, addressing each question directly to God. St. Ignatius of Loyola's Rules for the Discernment of Spirits counsel that in times of consolation we should make decisions; in desolation, we should not change course but intensify prayer. These verses model exactly that: the Psalmist does not abandon prayer or covenant — he intensifies his engagement with God precisely through the questions. The pivot of the whole psalm (v. 11 — "I will remember the works of the LORD") suggests the spiritual discipline for today: when feeling abandoned, the Catholic practice of recalling God's past faithfulness — in one's own life, in the sacraments, in salvation history — is the path through, not around, the dark night.