Recovering Life #4: My heart is faint
from Languishing through Lamenting to Life
It seems we’re languishing: a word that has resonated in the hearts and minds of many in 2021. The article by psychologist Adam Grant in the New York Times has been readly wide and shared. He defines languishing as,”…a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.” When we’ve become stagnant this fresh perspective or even fresh language can help us find our way forwards.
Is it any wonder our hearts are faint? They’ve been carrying the weight of grief for a prolonged period. Never mind the considerable burden of anxiety that accompanied each twist and turn.
“A joyful heart is good medicine,
but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.”
Proverbs 17.22
My heart is faint. The words resonated with me as I led our church family in a time of praying our emotions over to God through the Psalms. We were responding not only to Covid, but also the tremors of the earthquake that followed the death of George Floyd had crossed the Atlantic to Ireland. It had deeply shaken those in our own multicultural church, especially those who were black and felt the trauma deeply.
As I was leading others I too was feeling faint. I was looking forward to lightening the load on holiday. Little did I know what lay in store with my health and how this would be a gift in restoring my heart and giving life to my soul.
When it comes to languishing is there anything we can do? The current wisdom is to name our feelings and accept them. To go with the flow rather than resist or work against them and so swim against the tide. We are to name them and let them pass flow through us as we move along.
This harmonises with the ancient wisdom of Proverbs, in the Scriptures, as we are instructed to,
“Keep your heart with all vigilance,
for from it flows the springs of life”
Proverbs 4.23
The heart, which is the inner person: thinkings, feelings and source of our doings: is the fountain from which our very life flows. We are to pay attention to it and be vigilant: naming those feelings as they flow from us.
In recent years there has been a welcome movement towards promoting positive mental health. There has been a freeing of the stigma associated with this. “It’s ok not to feel ok and it’s absolutely ok to ask for help.” Let’s watch our hearts and also get the help that’s needed.
There is a sense however, in which, “It’s not ok to feel ok.” None of us wants to be, ‘not ok’. Has some of the message around mental health not only given permission to struggle whenever stress hits, but rather to expect this.
Is it actually undermining our resilience?
Are we watching our hearts, but not keeping them?
The emptiness attributed to languishing comes from being malnourished, not in our bodies as much as in our hearts and minds. We are low on the “psychological fuel” we need to operate optimally- including new experiences and rest. During the pandemic our lives have also been interupted. We’ve been displaced from our normal rhythms and routines. The flow, which is losing your sense of time in an activity, which is an antidote to languishing is sadly lacking.
I wonder if this lack of “psychological fuel” and a life full of distractions and interuptions were seeds sown before Covid rained on the world and brought them to grow? Could it be that in snacking on our social media, being immersed in our phones, being continually interupted by whats app messages has left us malnourished? In scrolling our feeds, we’ve not managed to feed our souls. The fast pace of our lives and the shallowness of much of what we feed on means we’re empty and languishing.
To be fair to the phones they can serve us content that indeed is enriching for us. We certainly don’t lack many other ways in which we seek the immediate dopamine hit of instant gratification. In the strains of life we feed on varied comforts to help us cope. Instant gain can become long term-pain.
Mindfulness and meditation are practices encouraged to protect our mental health. They help us to keep in touch with our feelings and thoughts and to watch them pass through us. These practices shares similarities with prayer when we name our thoughts and feelings before God.
The prayerbook of the Scriptures, the Psalms, has given solace to many in times of trouble both today and in the past. The Psalms give words to our feelings which we name before God. So they follow the same path as mindfulness and meditation, yet with a key difference: God is in the picture. We are not talking to ourselves, but involving Him in the conversation.
At the doorway to this book in it’s opening Psalm we have a picture which is a tonic to those whose hearts are faint. For the one who meditates on God’s words day and night- who prayerfully soaks their minds and hearts in these Psalms they are “like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither” So these Psalms not only give our feelings words, but bring God’s words to our feelings, bringing us to life.
At the conclusion of the 150 Psalms we have climbed a mountain to a place of lofty joy and praise. As well as being the prayer book they are the song book for God’s people down through the years. So, we sing with the choir at the happy ending.
The pathway between may surprise you. They have been described as an “anatomy of the soul”. Every emotion provided for! A varied path, but the majority are laments. They are written to help us with our grief and loss in a broken and suffering world. They offer us a way of handing our sorrows over to God. Some even give us words for the loss of God himself- for when we feel God-abandoned.
My God, my God why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night but I find no rest.
Psalm 22.1-2
These words may be more familiar to us from Jesus crying out in His dereliction on the cross. As he faced the shame, separation and sharp pain he expressed a deep lament. So, as we encounter the words of lament in the Psalms, we know He prays them with us. In his humanity he suffers, not only for us, but with us.
On the painful road he had been given to walk Jesus sought strength in prayer. This is especially noted in Luke’s gospel. Facing the anguish of the cross Jesus is fueled and fed by this Psalm of lament. Indeed the Psalms, John Piper says, were His strength in Holy Week and also His script.
As Jesus also suffered for us he fulfilled the Psalms. Psalm 22 contains many allusions to the crucifixion, yet written hundreds of years previously.
“I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death.” v.14-15.
This fulfilment is noted at the beginning, middle and end of Luke’s account of Jesus life. He opens the gospel by saying that many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us. Throughout it’s pages this word for fulfilment recurs frequently, until at the end following His resurrection Jesus he assured his disciples,
“This is what I told you while I was still with you:
everything must be fulfilled that is written about me
in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and Psalms.”
Luke 24.44
So Jesus has fufilled Psalm 22 and indeed all the Psalms. The suffering and sorrow of Psalm 22 finds its way to an ending of praise, as God has come to the rescue. In the same way the whole book of Psalms makes its way through the sorrows of the laments, the anxieties of the trust psalms and the sin of the Psalms of confession to arrive at the place of joy. This path is fulfilled by Jesus: who has gone through suffering for our sin to bring us to a place in the end where there will be no more sorrow or suffering.
Here is life for the languishing. That we own our part in our hearts being faint. We’ve been feeding on created things, rather than the Creator, on good things, which we have made god things.
So we also own our part on the way to life. We name all our emotions before the One who feels with us and who has suffered for us. We can pray through the Psalms in all our changing emotions, knowing God will refresh and sustain us in His life.
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