December 13, 2022
Psalm 42 NRSV
Longing and Belonging to God
As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and behold
the face of God?
3 My tears have been my food
day and night,
while people say to me continually,
“Where is your God?”
4 These things I remember,
as I pour out my soul:
how I went with the throng[a]
and led them in procession to the house of God,
with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving,
a multitude keeping festival.
5 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God, for I shall again praise God,
my help 6 and my God.
My soul is cast down within me;
therefore I remember you…
7 Deep calls to deep
at the thunder of your torrents;
all your waves and your billows
have gone over me.
8 By day the Lord commands God’s steadfast love,
and at night God’s song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life.
9 I say to God, my rock,
“Why have you forgotten me?
Why must I walk about mournfully
because the enemy oppresses me?”
10 As with a deadly wound in my body,
my adversaries taunt me,
while they say to me continually,
“Where is your God?”
11 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God, for I shall again praise God,
my help and my God.
The poetry of the Psalms speaks across contexts and generations, and it speaks to me in my faith life right now.
The anguish and longing for a world with less cruelty are visceral truths that I feel deep in my bones and cells. We all carry the wounds of our ancestors even as we carry the faith that brought them through difficult and dangerous times. The psalmist in this particular poetic expression uses hunger and thirst on a soul level to name this longing, this deep need, this ache for God’s hopes for humanity to be realized. It is embodied poetry: a soul with hunger pains, a soul dehydrated from a world that seems so far away from God’s promises. I feel that, I feel those hunger pains and that dehydration sometimes.
And the world mocks the psalmist’s faithfulness with taunts like “where is your God?” These taunts can create even deeper sadness for the psalmist because of the heavy grief that comes with loss of community, with oppression from people that had been friends or even family. The psalmist’s tender trust of God as “my help” and “my rock” and “my life” are not destroyed by the taunts. At the same time, the psalmist carries the weight of the world’s cruelty—and the grief that comes from the way humans can hurt each other and can use vulnerability as an opportunity to overpower or to harm or to oppress or exploit. All of us are carrying the wounds of relationships. And those wounds often get reopened when we experience broken trust or betrayal and rejection in life. I struggle sometimes with how cruel the world can be.
I wonder where you are in this psalmist’s mourning and in this psalmist’s trust? I invite you to read through Psalm 42 a few times today. Let it speak to you and through you and for you. Consider letting a word, phrase, feeling or image emerge that wants to spend more time with you. You could take five minutes to write or draw or walk with that word or phrase and notice what feelings come up and how God’s steadfast love surfaces for you, too.
Advent is an invitation to pause in our feelings—particularly in our longing, in our grief, and in our trust, and let God meet us there. “I shall praise God again, my help and my God.”
Marcia Mount Shoop