Maybe other people do this too. I imagine being vindicated in court. “Imagine” might suggest deliberate mental activity, but this is more like unconsciously scratching an itch: as with a soldier at attention, not scratching requires deliberate mental action, and picturing myself in court as the accused is more unconsciously natural than not doing so.
     There I assemble all the arguments for myself and against imagined accusers, or against imagined people who simply mock and laugh at me. There is always something that I am embarrassed about or something going on that could be called a “pattern of sin.” There are always imagined (never with real-world names) finger-pointers, and I protest in my imagination against any thought that they might be right.
     I am encouraged by Psalm 9 and some other psalms to believe that I’m not the only one who does this sort of thing. So there are others, but I would not go to the extent reached by the “I” of Psalm 9, who gives a name — “the Lord” — to the vindicating judge. But that does allow the reflexively imagined vindication to be also prayer. But being sure of oneself enough to give God a place in this imagined scene seems to have become “where angels fear to tread.” Perhaps we (“we Christians” or “we postmoderns”? I’m not sure.) have a humbler awareness that if God keeps track of sin, none of us are vindicated (Psalm 130:3).
     At any rate, there goes the psalm-singer with an sharp awareness of his or her “enemies,” who are just as easily called “the wicked” (Psalm 9:3, 5, 6, 16, 17; “those who hate me” in v. 13) and identifying himself or herself with “the poor,” “the oppressed,” and the like (vv. 9, 12, 13, 18). The singer is sure of vindication in the court where the Lord is the judge, even speaking of it as already completed (vv. 4–6). But he or she is also sure that the Lord’s court is never to be adjourned, that it is permanently open for those who need such vindication (vv. 7–12).
     Indeed, this court not only is always open but is universal in its reach. Alongside the “enemies”/“wicked” are “the nations” and “the peoples” (vv. 5, 8, 15, 17, 19, 20) and “cities” and “the world” (vv. 6, 8). This connects with a different room in my imagination-house, the room where I worry about what the hell is going on in the world. I hope to avoid the mistake of age (68 on my most recent birthday) of regarding the new and unfamiliar as necessarily evil. Let’s just say that it’s clear that people are dealing with different things now than when “gender?” had only two possible answers and neither was a matter of choice, when the oddest denomination in town was Jewish and nobody mowed their lawn on Sunday till after 12:30, and when a kid could go to the front of the plane and get a winged pin from the pilot.
     It’s hard to live in a world in which not everyone loves me and my people (Americans), but studying some history will help us see that living here (in the world) has always been hard, especially when knowledge about what goes on in the world is readily available. The more we know, the more we are likely to feel the conflict between what is and what should be. Just thank God that we even have a sense of “what should be,” even if we disagree intensely about what that “what should be” should look like.
     So in prayer we go with the psalm singer to God and tell him what the world is like and confidently ask him to deal with it, whichever side we might end up on.

• I, as much as anyone, have accused our age of being obsessed with the courtroom and shaped by its language (e.g., in the posts titled “Justification 1” and “Being Human as Subversion”), and I might account for the form of my imagined vindication from that obsession. But a glance at some of the psalms, some of Jesus’s parables, or Ramsay MacMullen’s Roman Social Relations (Yale University Press, 1974) will prove that other times and places have shared that obsession.
• Some of what is touched on here comes up from a different angle in my post “Love 3.0: Perfect Love.”