Praying the Emotional Depths of the Psalms
A Christian who wants to grow out of a reactionary life and into an enriched soul and spirit must learn to pray the psalms. Does that surprise you? The psalms teach us how to encounter the world and live as fully human in it, as God intended. The psalms provide words to say to our enemies, to God, to ourselves.
In some ways the psalms teach us what it means to experience the world with faith—real, earthy, feet-to-the-ground faith. And the evidence of our faith in moments of mountaintop joy or valley-floor despair is what we do with the real emotions that come—because they do come. To experience fear, anger, despair, depression, or anxiety isn’t a lack of faith. Our faith is evident in what we do with these emotions.
David’s expression of faith in these psalms is evidence that he is not an escapist. He does not avoid his emotions. He’s not sweeping them under the rug or hiding. He is clearly exposing his fears to God, who already sees and knows. David knows that he will never be healed if he doesn’t bring his emotions, his fears, his anger into God’s presence.
GETTING TO KNOW YOUR ANXIETIES
Prayer must include some healthy exploration of our emotional life. This is not navel-gazing but holding still enough to see ourselves clearly. For many of us this means we do not escape to our phones, our email, or our social media feeds when emotions prove overwhelming. We hold on and look in. It’s not easy.
“Cast your anxieties on him,” Peter tells us (1 Pet. 5:7). But we can only do that if we know our anxieties. We sometimes think people who examine their emotions are emotionally unhealthy. But it’s the people who choose to escape from them who are unstable. We examine our fears, then pray them. We take a good look at our anger and call on God to heal us from it.
God doesn’t want us with happy words and heavy hearts. The psalmists teach us to speak truthfully. Take Psalm 88 as an example. Reading this psalm can make the pious among us blush. It’s a psalm of complaint. It’s uncomfortable reading. The psalmist is almost too honest; we might feel the need to say “Don’t talk that way.” If our children prayed this way, we’d likely hush them. “Don’t talk that way to God!” Yet here it is in the psalms.
A PSALM OF COMPLAINT
Psalm 88 is a lament in the form of complaint—not a complaint against his enemies but against God. Here’s what he’s experiencing:
Judgement—“You [the Lord] have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep” (v. 6), “Your wrath lies heavy upon me” (v. 7), “your dreadful assaults destroy me” (v. 16). “O Lord, why do you cast away my soul? Why do you hide your face from me? (v. 14). Unanswered prayer—“I cry out day and night before you” (v. 1), but God never answers. He begins his day with prayer and ends his day with crying out to God, yet the Lord “hides his face from me” (v. 14).
Abandonment—“ You have caused my companions to shun me, you have made me a horror to them (v. 8). “You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness” (v. 18). A better translation of verse 18 is “darkness has become my closest friend.” Darkness, claims the psalmist, is a closer friend than you, Lord.
CAN I TALK TO GOD LIKE THAT?
This is startling language. Are we allowed to talk to God this way? You almost want to encourage the man to go on a walk, take a few deep breaths, and then come back to prayer. But no, here it is.
Now, if this is God’s Word, why did God allow this psalm in? Why didn’t he edit it out? If Psalms is God’s hymnal and praise book, why did he allow a song that is so full of complaint against him? Isn’t that remarkable?
But God is not so insecure and unsure of himself that he can’t take our criticism. God not only allows these words, he is ultimately the author of them. The wondrous thing about Psalm 88 is that in it the Lord gives his people words to say when we’re numb with pain. This is a prayer for the troubled.
Derek Kidner says, “The very presence of this psalm in the Bible shows us that God hasn’t abandoned those who are full of trouble and despair, but that he is still with them. He wrote this psalm because he knows how men speak when they are desperate.” Psalm 88 is God’s way of giving us words when we don’t have any or maybe when we are fearful to express what we are thinking.
Athanasius said it best, “Most Scriptures speak to us; the Psalms speak for us.”
THE SLOW WORK OF PRAYER
To pray along with the angry, confused, and desperate psalms is to trust that God knows what to do with our emotions. It is to put on the emotional depth of the psalms. These psalms enlarge our hearts and deepen our experience of the world, ourselves, and God.
“For centuries,” Eugene Peterson writes, “from the beginning, if Christians wanted to learn how to pray, they would open their Bibles to the Psalms and pray them; faithfully and for a lifetime. That’s how most Christians for most of the Christian centuries have matured in prayer.”
This formation in prayer is slow work.
Adapted from Possibility of Prayer by John Starke. Copyright (c) 2020 by John Starke. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.
John Starke is the lead pastor at Apostles Church Uptown in New York City. He is the co-editor (with Bruce Ware) of One God in Three Persons. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and four children.