“Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within
me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God.” Psalm 42
In verse three of this psalm, some shrill voices are taunting,
as they do again in verse ten; but unlike so many other songs in the book, in
this one, Psalm 42, the enemy is not the psalmist’s Godless enemies, but his
own miserable self.
What’s clear in the opening verses is that David—if he’s the
author—has seemingly fallen into a chapter from Saul’s life, Israel’s very
first king, the potentate who wrote the book on depression. His darkness is self-imposed: “Why are you downcast, O my soul?” is not the
question David would ask himself on a battlefield. The war here—or so it seems to me—is within. “Why are you down in the dumps?” is the way
Eugene Peterson puts it.
If Psalm 42 were a short story—which it isn’t—I might be
willing to hazard this analysis: in
verse six, we’ve arrived at the climax, maybe not the dramatic climax of the
narrative, but the technical climax, because, somehow, we get the sense he’s
turned the corner, that the conflict has been bested.
Right here in the psalm, this narrator—emotionally
enfeebled—rallies, not because someone tells him he should, but because he
tells himself he should. “Put your
hope in God, fool,” he argues and then commits:
“I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” He’s gritting his teeth, pushing himself up
by his own spiritual bootstraps, rallying himself as if he were the captain of
his own cheerleading squad.
Were some student to hand me this story, I’d likely red-pencil,
“I’m not convinced” somewhere in the margin, and then scribble in something
even more widely scribbled in on student stories: “show us, don’t tell us.”
But when we read on, it seems clear that the answer he
commits to in this verse doesn’t shoo the darkness. Psalm 42 is not at end. The whole poem may well
be a technical climax to the big story. I sort of like that idea, even though
if there is no satisfying denouement.
It seems to me that what David is calling on to cure himself
is what he already knows but may have forgotten or simply not mustered. What he
now believes will deliver him from the darkness is not a bromide he’s buying
from someone else because he already knows the way to health and joy.
You can almost feel him trying to bully away his personal
demons: “I WILL YET PRAISE HIM,” he
tells himself, doing everything he can to refresh his own faith, telling
himself—a mantra even—something he knows so very well but has somehow lost.
He’s not asking God to ride in on a heavenly steed; he’s not
asking to be saved. Instead, he’s telling his own darkened
spirits what he already knows but has forgotten or stopped believing—that his
only hope and comfort is in the Lord.
The joy of David’s poetry, read thousands of years later in
a world David himself wouldn’t begin to
understand, is our blessed realization that a human heart beats in every line. These
are God songs, divinely inspired; but to read them as if they weren’t the work
of a human soul is to miss half the inspiration.
In Psalm 42, David knows the truth he simply can’t muster. Every
believer who’s ever been “down in the dumps” has been there, feeling exactly
that pain. Every one.
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