Sunday Morning Meds--Musing

“I mused, and my spirit grew faint.” Psalm 77

It’s a 19^th century line, something lifted from old novel with a frontispiece portrait of an anxious woman sitting in an English garden.  It’s the kind of line I sometimes get from young women writers, even today, who imitate the old mannered styles they once loved—as in “’Oh, Santana,’” she mused, sighing.”  That kind of thing.

“I mused, and my spirit grew faint,” Asaph says—back of hand quickly to forehead, roll eyes slightly.  When lifted on its own from the text of Psalm 77, it’s hard to take seriously.

I used to cross such usage out of my students’ stories, mark them “Yucch.”  In our post-modernity, when most anything goes, I simply ask the students if they really want to invoke such old-fashioned sentimentality. Used to because eventually I became a kinder, gentler teacher.

If etymology serves us well, muse has an interesting history, its French ancestral usage was related to a dog’s muzzle, a source which prompts word historians to speculate that muse might have to do with the way a dog raises its snoot in the air when it wants to determine direction or difficulty.  Plus, there’s the proximity of the word muse to amused, which Asaph, abed in misery here, it seems, certainly is not.  But nothing in either image helps us with the emotional heft of Asaph’s musing.

Experts say 48 percent of the American public do well nightly; a majority of us, however, do not. If the polling is accurate, more than half of us are up late, most of us musing, maybe, like Asaph, unable to sleep because, like the mythical princess, we bothered by some proverbial pea.

Edgar Allen Poe used to claim his strange visions emerged in that somnambulant state between sleep and consciousness, if we can believe him. But I’m sure that it’s not ghastly visions that kept Asaph awake, nor the fact that he took too much work home. As far as we know, he didn’t have a bad marriage, lousy cash flow, or troubled kids. All we know is, oddly enough, he mused; and that musing felt like too much hot salsa in his soul.

Like old age, Psalm 77 is not for sissies. It’s dark; and I’m not doing Asaph or the song credit by being silly about it—dog snoots, mattress peas, and Poe’s guillotine visions. Asaph claims he sat on his bed all night long, hands raised as if to receive a blessing that never came—nothing funny about that.  But then, perhaps if you can’t sleep, one way of steeling yourself against anxiety may well be laughter, the best medicine. 

By the time he’s finished, Asaph will turn Psalm 77 into a praise song, but before we stumble into the light we’ve got to wander a bit through the dark night of the soul, where sleep is a blessing that simply doesn’t arrive. 

I know I’ve said it before, but here once again—this time in Asaph’s psalm of sleeplessness: the blessing of holy scripture arrives is its story of God’s love; but yet another marvelous feature is that we aren’t alone in our restlessness. Even psalmists were anxious. Even saints couldn’t sleep.

Too many of us likely spend too much anxious time musing, or so says the surveys. Psalm 77 is a reminder that we’re not alone.