As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants
my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear
before God?
My tears have been my food day and night,
while they say to me all the day long,
“Where is your God?”
These things I remember, as I pour out my
soul:
how I would go with the throng
and lead them in procession
to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of
praise, a multitude keeping festival.
Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are
you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my
salvation and my God.
My soul is cast down within
me; therefore I remember you
from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from
Mount Mizar.
Deep calls to deep at the roar of your
waterfalls;
all your breakers and your waves have gone
over me.
By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,
and at night his song is with
me, a prayer to the God of my life.
I say to God, my rock: “Why have you forgotten
me?
Why do I go mourning because of the oppression
of the enemy?”
As with a deadly wound in my bones, my
adversaries taunt me,
while they say to me all the day long,“Where
is your God?”
Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are
you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall
again praise him, my salvation and my God.
Psalm 42
Reflection – Well, I am back from a lovely
week at Cana Colony, the MH-run family camp, and the blog is back as well, with
this lovely psalm. As a matter of fact, the Church prays this psalm as part of
its Morning Prayer on this very day, Monday Week 2.
It is a
psalm well suited to the morning, especially the morning after a difficult
night, a night spent tossing and turning in a fever of anxiety, perhaps, or
some deep trouble. As usual in the psalms, we don’t know what the exact problem
is the psalmist has, and this is good, as we can apply the psalm to whatever
our troubles may be right now.
This psalm
is particularly good due to its fine poetic imagery—‘as a deer pants for
flowing streams… deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls… why are you
cast down, O my soul...’ And in this imagery, we can see the constant message
of all of the psalms: whatever the specific trouble, whatever the details of
our lives and their burdens and sorrows, what is really happening in and
through all of them is one simple and basic thing.
Namely, we
are touching the radically incomplete and broken nature of creation as it is,
and in that feel keenly and deeply our need for God’s redemption, His radical
intervention in our lives and in the life of the world.
It is all in
there in this psalm—the fear that God is actually absent or even non-existent,
the desire to see all humanity united and entering the house of God to praise
Him, the memory of past graces to sustain us in current hardship, the relapse nonetheless
into deep despondency and doubt, and the final message of hope and out of hope,
praise of God.
All in all,
it is a fairly typical morning after the night before (so to speak) in MH, and
perhaps in your life, too! And that is as it should be—until we are at the end
of the pilgrimage and do enter and see the face of God, we will be in some
place in Psalm 42, somewhere and in some fashion engaged with the broken ‘not
yet’ quality of the world as it is, and needing to move in a spirit of hope to
the world as it will be, the world as God is fashioning it to be in Christ.
That’s what
we’re all doing today, or at least are supposed to do in the midst of whatever
else we are about, so let’s get at it.
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