Psalm 42:1-11
Controlling our Emotions

As the deer pants for the water brooks,
      so my soul pants after you, 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 continually ask me, "Where is your God?"
These things I remember, and pour out my soul within me,
      how I used to go with the crowd, and led them to the house of God,
      with the voice of joy and praise, a multitude keeping a holy day.
Why are you in despair, my soul?
      Why are you disturbed within me?
Hope in God!
      For I shall still praise him for the saving help of his presence.
My God, my soul is in despair within me.
      Therefore I remember you from the land of the Jordan,
      the heights of Hermon, from the hill Mizar.
Deep calls to deep at the noise of your waterfalls.
      All your waves and your billows have swept over me.

Yahweh will command his loving kindness in the daytime.
      In the night his song shall be with me:
      a prayer to the God of my life.
I will ask God, my rock, "Why have you forgotten me?
      Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?"
As with a sword in my bones, my adversaries reproach me,
      while they continually ask me, "Where is your God?"
Why are you in despair, my soul?
      Why are you disturbed within me?
Hope in God! For I shall still praise him,
      the saving help of my countenance, and my God.

World English Bible

The psalmist shares with us an important lesson he has learned about faith, and that lesson is that our emotions can lead us the wrong way.

We may not recognize that lesson immediately, because the psalmist keeps talking about how his "soul" is aching. To our way of thinking, we have a body that we see as a metaphor for worldly imperfection, as Paul writes about the weakness of the "flesh". In contrast, we have a soul that is the perfection of God in us, and is the part of us that will live forever. That division of ourselves into body and soul is encouraged by an ancient Greek philosophy that sees the earth as an imperfect copy of a perfect conceptual world.

Hebrew philosophy at the time of the Psalms thought of a person as unified, not a body and a spirit that were at odds with each other. The part that was God-like was intertwined and inseparable from the part that was animal-like, and all of it together was human. When the psalmist wrote the word we translate as "soul", he used the Hebrew word nephesh, which means that which has breath. In just the same way, the Hebrew words for spirit, wind, and breath are one in the same. So, this term nephesh could mean humans who have God's Breath–Spirit in us, and animals that also breathe, and anything that has vitality, energy, zest for life, or even urges, lusts, and desires.

What an interesting, un-Greek way of seeing ourselves! God is not an esoteric concept in an ideal, ethereal world; God, the source of Breath/Spirit, is full of vitality, and God's gift of Spirit can be expressed in joyous praise—or in misguided, destructive, unchecked desires.

This is insight the psalmist explained for us as he poured out his emotions. He longed for God's closeness, even as his emotions felt so lost and alone. But the psalmist knew that what he felt was only emotion wandering away from the path he should travel. His discipline urged him to check his emotions, his memory recalled evidence of God's frequent presence, so his whole self chose to accept that God is always nearby, even when he didn't "feel" that way.

Just as we can misunderstand "soul" in this Psalm, we also can misunderstand "heart" in the Bible. We should "love the Lord our God with all our heart", but that does not mean heart as the center of romantic emotions any more than God's love is like a teenage infatuation. "Love" is about dedication as much as it is joy, and our love of God requires the entirety of ourselves, mind, body, emotion, soul... breath... seeking to satisfy our primal thirst for God. It is not one factor in us, but every part of us, dedicated in service to the Giver of Life.