The Downcast Soul

“Why so downcast, O my soul?” Have you ever asked yourself that question? I certainly have.

The reasons for the psalmist’s sadness seem fairly clear. We see in verse 9 that he is being oppressed by an enemy, in verse 10 that he is being taunted by those around him: “Where is your God?” Have you heard this question, before—maybe not coming from taunters around you, but perhaps from a taunter within you? Do you ever hear a nagging voice saying “Does God really care whether you can meet your budget this month? Does God really care whether you find that relationship you’re looking for? Does God really love you? Who could love you?” I think these internal taunts can be particularly hurtful, because unlike external taunts, you can’t shut them out—they’re always with you. And since they come from your own thoughts, they can feel more “real” or more “valid” than the ravings of some external lunatic. “Where is your God? Is he going to show up when you need him to?”

Longing

As if the taunts weren’t bad enough, the psalmist is also experiencing spiritual and vocational stress: We learn in verse 4 that he used to be a worship leader, leading all the people in a procession to the temple to celebrate a glorious festival. But, no longer, it seems. Whatever the reason for the separation, the psalmist longs for a return to the house of God, longs for a restoration of that connection with God.

“As the deer pants for streams of living writer,” says the psalmist, “so my soul pants for you, O God.” Think about this image for a moment: What does a deer panting for water feel? Thirsty, parched, weak, maybe in pain, aches from dehydration, maybe something like desperation if the water isn’t nearby or easily found. “So my soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” Such a longing.

All our longings point to our deepest longing for connection with God.

What do you long for? A job, a relationship, contentment, security, praise, excitement, peace, escape, to conquer, to be known, to be loved? In his book The Safest Place on Earth, Larry Crabb suggests that we shouldn’t be afraid of our longings. This isn’t to say that all of our longings are good—some of our longings are definitely misplaced. But, Crabb says that all of our wrong longings are actually just corruptions or perversions of a good and natural longing, and that all good longings are just a particular expression of our deepest longing, which is to know and be connected with God. A wrong longing to aggressively accumulate wealth is a twisting of the right longing for security that comes when we know and trust in God, our provider. A wrong longing to exact vengeance on someone who has hurt us is a twisting of the right longing for a just world that comes when God is king. A wrong longing to exercise power over others is a twisting of the right longing to fulfill the God-given command to exercise dominion over the earth, and thereby reflect the image of God who is ruler over all creation. A wrong longing for vain praise from others (on social media, say) is a twisting of the right longing to feel loved by God. Crabb suggests that when the community of the church is at its best, it is the safest place on earth for us to explore all of our longings, both the right ones and the wrong ones, to understand how they reveal our deepest longing for connection with God, who satisfies the desires of our hearts.

“As the deer pants for streams of living water, so my soul thirsts for God, for the living God.”

Remembrance

So, the author of Psalm 42 has some serious stuff going on, enough to make anyone depressed. How does he respond to his downcast soul? At the end of verse 5: “My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar,” and in verse 8, “By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me.” In the face of his circumstances and his downcast soul, the psalmist reminds himself of God, of his steadfast love, of his salvation, even though it feels as though God has forgotten him (verse 9).

Remembering is essential for spiritual health. All throughout the Old Testament, the prophets are always reminding the people of Israel that they’re talking about “God, who brought you up out of Egypt”—reminding the people of who God is and what God has done. This remembering is so important that when the people of Israel came out of Egypt, God set up a whole series of feasts that they were supposed to celebrate every year to remind them of who they are, who God is, and what God has done for them—the most important of these being Passover, the retelling of the salvation that God brought to his people while they were slaves in Egypt.

Remembering is essential for spiritual health.

As Christians, we, too, have celebrations that remind us of who we are, who God is, and what God has done for us. We celebrate the passion and resurrection of Jesus each year in Holy Week. Every Sunday, we come to the Lord’s table where we remind ourselves “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ is coming again.”

These corporate remembrances are good and helpful and necessary, but we can do even more remembering. We can recall individual memories of who we are, who God is, and what God has done for us. Notice in verse 4 that as he pours out his soul, the psalmist remembers the joy he had leading the people in “glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.” What a joyful memory that must have been!

Joy

Further Reading: Anatomy of the Soul by Curt Thompson. Joy Starts Here by Jim Wilder.

There are some Christians interested in taking what scientists are learning about how we humans operate in our physical selves and combining that with what we know from scripture about our spiritual selves to arrive at a deeper understanding of who God has created us to be. One interesting finding from neuroscience that they point out is how strongly geared our brains are to connect with others. In fact, some people have suggested a definition of joy that is based on the sensation of connection with someone else who loves you and wants to be with you. Under this way of thinking, our capacity for joy, that is, for connection with others who want to be with us, is what helps us to cope with pain. The more connection we have with others who want to be with us, the more joy we can experience, and the more pain we can endure.

Joy doesn’t eliminate pain, but makes it bearable.

So, one coping strategy for dealing with pain suggested by these ideas is to recall joyful memories—memories in which we are connected with others, and particularly memories in which we feel connected with God, in which we feel that God loves us, cares for us, wants to be with us. We can actually see an echo of this in Psalm 42: In verse 4, the psalmist is remembering the joy he experienced when he was connecting with others in the joyful multitude and connecting with God in the procession to the temple. These joyful memories don’t cancel out the pain, like positive and negative numbers canceling out to leave a balance of zero feelings. (After all, the psalmist still cries out, “Why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?” in verse 9.) Rather, in some way that I don’t totally understand yet, the presence of the joy makes the presence of the pain more bearable.

Remembering Connection

What memories do you have? Times where you felt the joy of connecting with someone else, times where you felt a connection with God?

I remember a time about six years ago: I was having a terrible day. I was stressed about I can’t even remember what, and it was weighing terribly on me. On top of all my work, a group of friends was coming over to my place, and I had to prepare dinner for us and get ready for the activity we were going to do. The stress of the week was overwhelming, and it was all I could do to go through the motions. This activity was a kind of guided prayer exercise. Usually when I did these activities, I would both lead the guided prayer and engage in the activity myself, but due to all the stress, I decided that I just couldn’t do it. My plan was just to read the instructions and keep the time and skip the personal prayer part. As I was sitting there, waiting to give the next instruction, decidedly not trying to connect with God and just trying to make it to the end of the day, an image suddenly came to my mind, completely unbidden: I saw a scene from earlier in the day, in which I was walking across campus, but instead of walking alone, I saw Jesus following me, walking close behind me. And to make the image a little weirder, Jesus was holding his hands up, as if he were “spotting” me in some gymnastics exercise. It was as if God was sending me a little reminder that even though it felt like I was going through this stressful time all alone, God really did “have my back” and was there to take care of me if things fell apart. What struck me so much, even beyond this encouraging thought on its own, was that the image came to me even though I was not particularly trying to connect with God. It was almost as if God was reminding me that he is there and taking care of me, even when I may be ignoring him. In God’s mercy and love, he sent me a reminder of his great care for me. He wants to be with me.

Listening Prayer

For a long time, I didn’t understand what people meant when they said “listening prayer.” My conception of prayer was something like “thinking stuff in God’s direction” without much in return. What did it mean to “hear from God”? After some time, I came to understand that some people take thoughts that come into their minds, like my image of Jesus following me across campus, as messages from God. The trick is separating the thoughts that come from God from the thoughts that I think up all on my own, and key to this is having a good sense of the kinds of things God says, based on what we already know God has said in scripture.

Steeped in scripture, we can develop a feel for the voice of God.

When you know someone really well, you don’t have to hear the words come straight from their lips to know if a given statement is something they would say. My friend Matthew is actually pretty good at this: Sometimes when he’s talking about what someone said, he’ll say it just like they would, intonation, gestures, and all. When you know the person he’s talking about, it’s so very vivid—yes, that’s exactly what he or she would have said! When we’re steeped in what God has said through scripture, what Jesus says in the Gospels, we can have a feel for the types of things God would say.

This doesn’t mean we’ll always get it right when we interpreting our thoughts as messages from God. But, when we’re being open to “hearing from God” in our thoughts, the attention we pay to our thoughts, and in particular to sorting out which thoughts sound like things God would say, helps us to remember God’s love for us and to grow in our knowledge of God’s character, to connect with God and sense that he wants to be with us.

Thanksgiving

The author of Psalm 42 responds to his downcast soul by remembering who God is and by recalling the joy he experienced in God’s presence with others. There’s also one more thing we see the psalmist do in response to his downcast soul: Verse 5 says “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.” I think this statement “I shall again praise him” could be taken in a couple of ways: The psalmist could be speaking about some future time in which he is back in the temple, leading the people with “glad shouts and songs of praise.” In this case, the psalmist is expressing hope that God will save him from his current trials. Alternatively, the psalmist might be saying that, even now in the midst of his suffering, he will again praise God. Thinking a little expansively about praise, I’d like to suggest that part of this is an expression of thanksgiving for the praiseworthy characteristics of God and the praiseworthy things God has done.

Remembrance and gratitude build our capacity for joy.

Gratitude is a great complement to remembering when we’re trying to respond to a downcast soul. In part, this is because gratitude shifts our focus, just for a moment, to something that isn’t so miserable in our lives, no matter how small. But even more than this, gratitude connects us with another person—namely, whoever it is to whom we express our thanks. That is, it’s a reminder that someone cares enough about us and wants to be with us enough to give us whatever it is for which we’re thankful. In this way, remembering and gratitude can work together to develop our capacity for joy, as we remember the things for which we’re thankful, and more importantly, remember the people (including and especially God himself) who care enough about us to be a part of our lives.

An Exercise in Holy Imagination

I’d like to conclude with an exercise in holy imagination. Just like God gave us our bodies and our minds to use them for good things, God gave us our imaginations, and we can direct our imaginations toward holy things to strengthen our sense that God loves us. When we direct our imagination to holy things, we don’t have to worry about the fact that these imaginings are something we’re dreaming up. If we imagine a scene where God says something that we know he has already said in scripture, we don’t have to worry about “putting words into God’s mouth” because we’re just taking the words he has already spoken and remembering them in a particularly vivid way.

Notice the unexpected: These are entry points for the Holy Spirit.

So, in a minute, I’ll invite you to close your eyes and to picture a scene. I’ll go through different parts of the scene—like what you see, hear, and feel—and invite you to pay particular attention to those sensations using your imagination. As you are imagining, be open to noticing parts of the scene that you weren’t expecting—these unexpected imaginings could provide food for thought, meditation, and prayer later. In particular, as you are imagining, be attentive to a sense that God loves you and wants to be with you: We already know from scripture that God is love and that he loves us beyond our imagining. Jesus has said that he will be with us always (and I’m quite confident he didn’t say that begrudgingly, so he wants to be with us!). You simply can’t imagine more love from God that he is already giving you, so press into those feelings—they are the seeds of your joy.

Let’s begin: I invite you to close your eyes and imagine with me.

Holy Spirit, we invite you to join us as we practice holy imagination.

This exercise is inspired by Ps 42:1.

Imagine that you are in a desert at midday. The sun is blazing in a cloudless sky. The air is stiflingly still. You are all alone and have been for some time. What do you see in the desert around you? What does the stillness sound like? What does the sun feel like on your skin? You have no water. What does the thirst feel like in your mouth and throat? What does it feel like to be so alone?

On the horizon, you see a figure coming steadily toward you. As the figure gets closer, you see that it is Jesus, and he is so glad to see you. He hands you a large jug of water, and you start to drink. Despite the heat, the water is as cool as ever, and you drink and drink and drink. What does the water feel like in your mouth? What does your drinking sound like? What is the expression on Jesus’ face as he watches you drinking? You keep drinking until your stomach can’t hold any more water.

Then Jesus picks you up and places his arm around your shoulders as you two start walking together. What does the weight of his arm feel like around your back? As you’re walking, Jesus starts to say, “Remember that time when…” Remember the time when what? What memory is Jesus recalling with you? Take a moment to remember with Jesus.

Jesus, we thank you for your unfailing faithfulness. We thank you that you are glad to be with us, even when our souls are downcast. We praise you for your great love for us. Amen.

As we break into small groups to pray, I invite you to share something for which you are thankful—it can be something small or something large, something you have currently or a memory of something from before. In addition to whatever else you may feel led to pray about, let’s remember and give thanks to God on behalf of one another for the good gifts he has given us.