On the Psalms

My companions have become darkness.¹

Not the cheeriest of phrases by any means, and not likely the expectation for the closing of a conversation (which it is – a conversation with God), or the topic of a sermon preached on Mother’s Day. (Nor is that a hypothetical example; a pastor, who shall rename nameless and to whom I am related, truly did make that passage his text one year on Mother’s Day.) It is, however, raw and real and honest, and it might just be Exhibit A in my case for why I love the Psalms, and why we need them.

I’m far from the only Christian with a penchant for the Psalms; some of the most universally recognized and much-loved passages are from the Psalms, and even non-Christians like to hear Psalm 23 in times of suffering and death. Most of the time, though, when someone says “Oh I love the Psalms!”, what they have in mind, especially if they’re a woman, is an Instagram-worthy visual of “Be still and Know that I am God”², probably written in a flowing script with a few floral sprigs in soft pastels, perhaps with a couple contrasting swirls in dark colors for good measure. They have in mind “He leads me beside still waters”³, “Praise the Lord, O my soul”⁴, “Worship the Lord in the beauty of His holiness”⁵, “I am Fearfully and Wonderfully Made”⁶ – all the quotes that make for great bookmarks and Bible covers, with a Thomas Kinkade-esque beach scene or waterfall, maybe a gently-flowing stream instead –  and that’s not without reason or merit. We look to the Psalms for comfort and inspiration and encouragement, and rightly so. That is, after all, one of the primary reasons they were written. I would hazard a guess that far less often a pronouncement of affection for the Psalms is accompanied by mental recall of phrases like “the waters have come up to my neck”⁷, “How long, O Lord? Will you be silent forever?”⁸, “My wounds stink and fester”⁹, “O God of vengeance, shine forth!”¹⁰, or “My enemies trample on me all day long”¹¹. And yet, those things are in the Psalms as well, and they too bring comfort, albeit of a different kind. 

Some of the most isolating moments of many of our lives are the times when we feel as though we are the first to experience X. Whatever it is, if we turn to a trusted resource and pour out our hearts, and the only response is one of blank stares or confusion, that sparks in us a feeling of isolation, and probably shame as well. We might feel less than, or other, fundamentally different from the one to whom we’re speaking, and alone. Likewise, some of the most unifying and connecting moments are those when a similar outpouring and emotion is met with “Me too”. C.S. Lewis, in fact, wrote in his book The Four Loves, “Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”. We find that moment of connection, the relief at finding one other person who knows what you’ve experienced, over and over again in the Psalms.

The Psalms encapsulate the whole of human experience, and give voice to a wide range of emotions. We find in the Psalms joy and happiness, delight in the Lord, communion and fellowship with other believers, trust and faith, a sure and certain knowledge of the Lord, rescue and salvation, all these positive things that we have likely experienced ourselves. But we also find grief and mourning, despair, doubt, questions, undeserved suffering, consequences for sin, injustice, persecution, and perceived silence from the Lord, and we’ve likely all experienced at least a few of those things as well. Further, we don’t just find snapshots of these experiences, stale images in which we can recognize moments that parallel events in our own lives. We also find language that enables us to express our emotions, words for when our own are inadequate or slow to arrive, and a model for how we can take our genuine emotions, both positive and “negative”, and carry them to the Lord in a productive manner. Courtney Resissig, in her article titled How Should Christians Feel?, phrased it this way: “In the Psalms, I found language for my distress. But I also found language for God: seeing him for who he is, I was able to verbalize my trust.”

We’d all like to think that our journey will always look like the still waters and green pastures, and never like overwhelming floods, miry clay, and the valley of the shadow of death. But the truth is that our human experience encompasses both, and the Psalms can be our guidebook for rightly expressing emotion without losing sight of the Lord. So love the Psalms. Love the calm words of quiet comfort and praise, of expressed joy and peace and trust. But love the other words too, the words of doubt and confusion and pain. And learn the patterns, that walk us through the floods and bring us back to the Lord. Love them, learn them, and live them.

¹ Ps 88:1 ² Ps 46:10 ³ Ps 23:3 ⁴ Ps 103 ⁵ Ps 96:9 ⁶ Ps 139:14 ⁷ Ps 69:1 ⁸ Ps 13:1 ⁹ Ps 38:5 ¹⁰ Ps 94:1 ¹¹ Ps 56:2