Emotional Health and the Psalms
This is what I told a room full of men this past weekend at Camp Buckner, just south of Inks Lake State Park and west of the Longhorn Caverns. An emotionally healthy person is able to say freely and without much fuss: “I was wrong.” “I need help.”
They’d also be able to say, “I made a mistake” and “I’m not sure” and “Please forgive me.”
Regrettably, and in some cases tragically, it’s variations on the theme of emotional unhealth that often mark our relationships with family and friends.
I told the guys at the Church of the Cross men’s retreat that emotionally immature persons experience painful events not just as a profound disappointment but as a personal threat.
Feeling this to be so, they resort to self-protective tactics as a mask for their feelings of insecurity. They live with pride, rage, coldness, worry and a crippling feeling of inadequacy, which drain the body of vitality and shatter social wellbeing.
Such a mode of being invariably results in being dominated by one’s feelings, losing the ability to think rationally, relationally erratic behavior, a more painful sense of being alone in the world and further alienation from the One who alone could secure their truest wellbeing.
But I also told them that the psalms could help us here.
What they would offer to us, among other things, is a divinely ordained therapeutic resource to rescue us from moving from “mad-to-bad” in our lives in order that we might face our broken and traumatic experiences of the world in emotionally healthy ways.
They’d also “enable us to bring into our conversation with God feelings and thoughts most of us think we need to get rid of before God will be interested in hearing from us,” as the Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis puts it.
And they’d help us to be perfectly honest about our broken lives—to be open and unafraid, that is, as the title of my book puts it.
I’ll happily recommend my psalms book to you if you’re interested in reading more on the topic, but there are lots of other good books too (see below). Whatever the book, though, the main thing is:
Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Trust that God will give you the grace to receive it and to accept also the help of friends, because this sanctifying work is a fundamentally communal one. And welcome with all of your heart the freedom that will come from dying to your “old” self so that you can become your “truest” self.
