Reflecting this week on our upcoming Blood Drive (08/21/22) brought me to this article by the Rev. Julian Duckworth on Psalm 79.  This excerpt mentions blood's internal meaning. It symbolizes our spiritual life. In its given context in the Psalm, a life composed of cycles where we (alternately) struggle against evil and are renewed by the Lord.  I hope you find it as uplifting to consider as I did!

Love and Peace,

Ethan

Psalm 79 is a woeful lament for the plight of Israel, and a prayer for Israel’s restoration. Verses 1 to 7 outline the series of losses, and verses 8 to 13 are a heartfelt prayer for a confident restoration.

It is important in a psalm of this nature, with its graphic images of destruction, loss, decay, and desecration, to appreciate that this is spiritual imagery not physical description. The state of the church is being portrayed, and the “church” is, at an inner level, our own internal spiritual condition. The church is ideally the state in our minds and lives where the Lord’s good and truth is honored and upheld, but here in this Psalm it has been violated and abused.

…[In the third verse] the spiritual meaning of “blood that is shed like water” is that our spiritual life (‘blood’) has wasted away and brought us unto death; “there are none to bury us” means that we have no remaining states of spiritual strength in us to dispose of our lifelessness so that new life may return.

Then the Lord is brought into this derelict situation, and a cry and a prayer is given. How long, O Lord? Will you be angry for ever? This and all that follows is the appearance - that the Lord is angry (and absent) from us. No, He is not; it is just that it seems to be like this from our perspective, where we are in this.

The real point is that we have now turned to the Lord which is always the right response in anything. To turn to the Lord brings us away from merely ourselves in what we are seeing and feeling. This principle happens in very many of the psalms, after a sorrowful start, we wonder if the Lord has brought this on us, but we begin to see that we need to allow the Lord to help us return back from our despair and retrieve a stable and beneficial new state. This is exactly what the Lord always wants for us. To see our sorrowful state is very often the springboard for our recovery.

This is mapped out in a kind of ascending graph from verse 8 onwards to the end of the psalm. First, there's a request for the Lord to let his tender mercies come to meet us, help us, deliver us, preserve us, as we spiritually open ourselves more and more to the healing power and restoration the Lord brings us. (Swedenborg, Divine Providence 37)

This is followed by the plea to return sevenfold to our neighbors – those spiritual attacks which came upon us – so that they are reproached just as they reproached the Lord. It is important for us to turn against the enemies of our own personal spiritual household with all the power we can use, in order to refute and disclaim their hold over us.

The psalm ends calmly and fittingly with the testimony that we are Your people and the sheep of your pasture and we will give you thanks for ever and show your praise to all generations. The spiritual meaning of this last verse is that it gives expression to our renewed state in which we feel we belong to the Lord and we are cared for and led by Him, and this will be true for ever.  (Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven 9263)