Whom Have I in Heaven but You?

Psalm 73 and the Slow Freedom from Complaint into Trust

The psalmist does not hide his struggle. He places it naked before God. “How useless to keep my heart pure…” is not the voice of rebellion, but of a wounded fidelity that has not yet learned how to breathe under the weight of affliction. Psalm 73 is the prayer of a man who has not abandoned God, yet feels betrayed by the logic of righteousness itself. He has washed his hands in innocence. He has guarded his heart. And still the blows have not ceased.

The fathers recognized this interior state immediately. They did not condemn it as unbelief, but they treated it as a dangerous threshold. A complaining spirit, they said, is not merely a habit of speech. It is a posture of the heart that quietly places God in the dock and demands an accounting. Abba Poemen warned that murmuring corrodes the soul from within, because it teaches the heart to look everywhere except God for rest. St. Isaac the Syrian goes even further. He says that when a man measures his life by justice alone, he will either grow proud or fall into despair. Mercy alone sustains the heart.

The psalmist knows this instinctively. He stops himself mid-thought. “If I should speak like that, I should betray the race of your sons.” Complaint, once voiced and nursed, does not remain private. It wounds communion. It teaches others to interpret their suffering as proof of abandonment rather than as a place of encounter. This is why the elders so often counseled silence in affliction. Not a silence of repression, but a silence that refuses to harden suffering into accusation.

Yet Psalm 73 does not resolve the tension by denying injustice. The wicked do seem to prosper. Their paths do appear smooth. The psalmist is not naïve. What changes is not the data of life, but the place from which he looks. “Until I entered the sanctuary of God.” The turning point is liturgical, noetic, relational. In the presence of God, the soul is freed from the tyranny of immediate appearances. The prosperity of the wicked is revealed not as blessing but as peril. “How slippery the paths on which you set them.” What looked like stability is exposed as a subtle falling.

The desert fathers often said that comfort received apart from God becomes anesthesia. It dulls the heart. It creates the illusion of life while quietly hollowing it out. The psalmist sees this clearly. The sudden ruin of the wicked is not divine vengeance but exposure. When life itself trembles, there is nothing underneath them. No depth. No refuge.

The psalm then turns inward, and here it becomes most personal and most dangerous. “My heart was embittered… I was stupid and did not understand, no better than a beast in your sight.” This is not self-loathing. It is repentance without theatrics. The psalmist recognizes that complaint had begun to deform his perception. He had reduced God to a concept to be evaluated rather than a presence to be trusted.

And then comes the line that the elders loved to linger over. “Yet I was always in your presence; you were holding me by my right hand.” Even in complaint. Even in confusion. Even in the temptation to accuse. God had not withdrawn. The suffering had not been abandonment. The hand had not let go.

Modern elders echo this relentlessly. St. Paisios warned that murmuring drives away grace not because God is offended, but because the heart closes itself. Elder Aimilianos spoke of thanksgiving as the spiritual posture that keeps the heart porous, able to receive life even when understanding collapses. Freedom, they taught, does not come from having life make sense. It comes from entrusting oneself to God when it does not.

The psalm ends not with answers but with adhesion. “Whom have I in heaven but you? There is nothing on earth I desire besides you.” This is the liberation promised to those who cling only to God. Not escape from suffering, but freedom within it. Not immunity from loss, but a heart no longer enslaved to outcomes. Flesh and heart may fail. Careers, plans, reputations, even spiritual self-images may fall away. “But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

The complaining spirit always asks, Why this? Why now? Why me? The psalmist teaches another prayer: Whom have I but You? In that question, joy is born: not as emotion, but as unshakeable orientation. The soul that clings only to God is no longer at the mercy of circumstances. It has already found its inheritance.