Psalm
42
July
5, 2020
As a
deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul
thirsts for God, for the living God.
When
shall I come and behold the face of God?
My
tears have been my food day and night,
while
people say to me continually, “Where is your God?”
These
things I remember, as I pour out my soul:
how
I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God,
with
glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.
Why
are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope
in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.
My
soul is cast down within me;
therefore
I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.
Deep
calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts;
all
your waves and your billows have gone over me.
By
day the Lord commands
his steadfast love,
and
at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.
I
say to God, my rock, “Why have you forgotten me?
Why
must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?”
As
with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me,
while
they say to me continually, “Where is your God?”
Why
are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope
in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.
Well,
here it is: a psalm fit for a pandemic! We don’t know the original setting of
its composition. We have no access to the specific circumstances that prompted
this poetic prayer. But we resonate with the emotions.
The
psalmist says, “I remember processing into the house of God. There was a crowd in
the sanctuary. Everybody was singing. Everybody burst into songs of
thanksgiving. There was a multitude. I remember that.” But looking around this
sanctuary, there is a smattering of saints, all six feet from one another. A
few here, a few there. If there is a multitude, it is the dispersed community
in Internet Land. Hardly anybody is singing.
We
are living through a disruptive and awkward season. Jobs have been lost.
Vacations are canceled. Loved ones have to remain a safe distance apart. One of
the married couples in our church family is already split between two cities in
two different states. The ruling has just come out: if she comes home from
Tennessee to spend some summer time with her husband, she must first be
quarantined for fourteen days. So the psalmist says, “My soul longs for you.”
Writing
about the psalms, someone has said these are “prayers meant to be overheard by
others.”[1]
Think about that for a minute. A lot of us say our prayers as if they are ours
alone: my concern, my worry, my words. But the psalms belong to all of us. And
when we don’t have the words for prayer, the prayers are given to us. When we
come across a psalm that stands some distance from our experience, it is still
a gift. It reminds us of what other people are praying. The words are waiting for
us, available for when we need them.
So
today, here is Psalm 42. It comes as a stanza and a refrain, a second stanza
and the refrain. Originally it was probably united with the next one, Psalm 43,
which comes with a single stanza and the identical refrain. Yet whoever split
them into two made a good decision. Psalm 42 stands on its own. The governing
theme is sadness.
Life
is not as it used to be. What we thought we could count upon has been
disrupted. All the old certainties are now questioned. The familiar rituals and
routines have unraveled. The poet describes the impact: “tears are my food,
night and day,” “my soul is downcast,” and “as I remember the happy songs of
the past, my inner being is disquieted.”
That’s
not a word we use every day, but we know what it means. The prefix sounds like
disturb, disgust, and disappointment. Disquiet is the opposite of quiet. Not
noisy, so much as anxious, unsettled, uneasy. Disquieted – do we know how that feels?
I think we do.
And
let me point out the awkward truth: Psalm 42 doesn’t give any quick answers. No
simple fixes. No rushing to resolution. The poet beckons us to hope, to hope in
God. I agree with him or her, whoever this is, but I can’t help but wonder if
the poet is trying to convince his or her own soul. Most of this psalm speaks
of a longing in the heart, a thirst not yet quenched, a hope not yet realized.
In
the meantime, what do we do? If the psalmist has no quick answer, neither do I.
I admit this is unsatisfying.
Some
years ago, we put a literature rack out in the narthex and filled it with
brochures. It was intended to be helpful, offering tips on getting through the
loss of a loved one, what to do if your teenager got mixed up in trouble,
things like that. One brochure was titled, “Your Negative Emotions.” Someone saw
it there, grabbed the whole stack, and knocked on my door.
“We
can’t put this out there,” she said. Why? “Because it’s so…so negative.”
“What’s
wrong with that?” I asked. “Well, uh, I think it gives the wrong message,” she
declared.
I
responded, “But do you think any negative people ever walk into the door of our
church?” She sputtered, “Oh, um, yes, I suppose they do. But I think we need to
be preaching positivity. We need to lift people’s spirits, not let them stay
negative.”
It
was at that point I shared with her a statistic that I had heard. It came from
a psychological study of church music. The context was those congregations that
fired their organists, got rid of the choirs, and brought in guitarists playing
soft-edged songs that were perpetually optimistic. In those congregations, said
the study, the rate of clinical depression was twice the rate of churches that
sang songs in a minor key.
The
point: if you shove down the negative emotions, if you gloss over them, if you pretend
they are not there, you might be creating even more damage, both in others as
well as yourself. The church is not called to speak of plastic optimism. The
church is called to speak the authentic truth.
“We
preach Christ crucified,” is how the apostle Paul put it. There is the hope of
resurrection, the hope of God restoring what has been broken, but that is
something we wait for God to do, not something we manufacture through razzle-dazzle
light shows and preachers in white shoes.
So
while we wait for God to do what we hope God to do, what do we do with what we
feel? I’m talking about the stewardship of our emotions. We know about the
stewardship of our money. We are called to a stewardship of nature and the
environment. Let’s talk about responsible stewardship of what we feel.
That
well-intentioned deacon who wanted to hide the brochure about negative feelings
was doing something that our culture has trained us to do: to shove whatever is
going on inside of us even further down. Don’t let anybody see what’s going on
in you. Maintain the stiff upper lip. Big boys don’t cry. Strong women keep
their hearts to themselves. This is the recipe for greater harm.
What
our colleagues in the healing arts have told us is that if we don’t work
through the pain, we will inflict it on others. As one said it simply, “Hurt
people hurt people.” The first person that I harm, of course, is myself. But it
doesn’t stop there, as you know. Have a difficult day, come home, grouch
around, yell at the dog, kick the people you love. Hurt people hurt people.
Fortunately,
there are professionals trained to help us. There are friends, too. The first
tool in their kit is the gift of listening, of coming along side with an open ear.
They don’t try to fix anything. They don’t have quick answers. They listen and
wait long enough to hear what’s going on.
When
Parker Palmer, the spiritual writer, was diagnosed twice with clinical depression,
he says the worst visitors were those who said, “I know exactly how you feel.”
He says he heard nothing beyond their opening words. “I knew it was a
falsehood,” he says. “No one can fully experience another person’s mystery.” They
offered sympathy out of their own anxiety. They pretended to be experts as a
way of avoiding the pain.
By
contrast, he names one friend who asked if Parker would allow him to come and
sit with him. Just sit. It was a special, Christ-like love, he says. “He never
tried to invade my awful inwardness with false comfort or advice; he simply
stood on its boundaries, modeling the respect for me and my journey – and the
courage to let it be – that I myself needed if I were to endure.”
This
kind of love was not expressed in pious words or empty cheerleading, as if
nothing good can happen unless we make it happen. Rather this love was patient,
kind, not insisting on its own way. This is the love that endures, for we were
created to endure. And we are created to love one another, to “share the sympathizing
tear.
That
is one of the clues in Psalm 42. After each stanza is a repeated refrain: Why
are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in
God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. These are words to repeat together. They are personal
words, but shared words. If we are in pain, we are part of a community in pain.
Others are struggling, too. In suffering, there can be solidarity. That’s the
first lesson. Nobody needs to suffer alone. We don’t need to suffer alone.
A second
lesson is right in front of our noses: the psalms are a gift from God through a
three-thousand-year-old community that has endured plenty of suffering. The
psalmist weeps when he hears the mocking voices around him, “Where is your God?”
That’s what they said to Jesus on the cross, as well: “Where is your God?” Yet
rather than give in and join the chorus, the faithful response is to make this
a matter of prayer.
In
the words of Psalm 42:
I
say to God, my rock, “Why have you forgotten me?
Why
must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?”
The
answer does not come right away. The answer hardly ever comes right away. But the
question must be asked. And the writer Kathleen Norris reminds us of the
paradox. In one breath, we conceive of God is “my rock,” and in the next, “Why
have you forgotten me?” One asks, “Why are you cast down, my soul?” and the
other responds, “Hope in God, my savior and my God.”
She
writes,
Who has not heard these voices within, at
one moment expressing hope and joy, and in the next reflecting doubt and
sorrow? This psalm challenges me, even is it allows me a safe harbor where I
might remember and give thanks for all the good gifts that bring both joy and
pain. The two cannot be neatly separated in grief, or in life itself… the tears
work best with praise and affirmation…Sorrow without thanksgiving would be
despair; thanksgiving without repentance would be a presumptuous illusion.[2]
So
we pray the whole jumbled mess, voicing both “memory and desire, stirring dull
roots with the spring rain.” The psalms are scripts for our souls, a way to
stay in communion with God even when we are disquieted.
Speaking
of God, the answer for our questions lies with God, and God alone. What we are
learning all over again is that human progress is always compromised by human
weakness. Human wisdom is always undermined by human foolishness. This weekend,
we sing Happy Birthday to a single nation that is torn into pieces by selfish
individualism, without any regard for what is good for all the people in our
nation.
Why
are we cast down and disquieted? Let us count the ways. So we pray and wait for
God. And we remember what kind of God we have.
To
give us another text, I found a few words from W.E.B. DuBois, the eloquent thinker
who truly believed that all people are created equally in the image of God. In
voicing his own disquiet as an African American, he pointed ahead to the final
justice of God. He could hear it in the Christian spirituals, what he called
the “Sorrow Songs” that emerged from authentic human pain. And he says:
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs
there breathes a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor
cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it
is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless
justice in some fair world beyond.
He
took a breath, and then he added:
If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things
there dwells Eternal Good, then (shortly) in His good time America shall rend
the veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free, as the sunshine trickling
down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young
voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below – swelling with
song, instinct with life, tremulous and darkening bass.[3]
With
DuBois, we trust in the ultimate justice of things. So we pray,
Why are you cast down, O my
soul, and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall
again praise him, my help and my God.
And
we leave the door open for hope to come home.
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
[1] Gerald Sheppard, “Theology and the
Book of Psalms,” Interpretation 46, April 1992. 145.
[2] Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me:
A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008)
279-280.
[3] W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of
Black Folk (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994) 162.
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