So, what is it about the Psalms that can help us learn this kind of vulnerability before God? Consider the different approaches taken in Psalm 111 (expressing praise) and Psalm 13 (expressing lament). But in skipping over the more difficult psalms, we inadvertently close ourselves off to the reality that all emotional states can be a place of worship and that every experience, even (maybe especially) the hard ones, can become a meaningful part of our dialogue with God. This kind of emotional diversity when it comes to worship is unfortunately foreign to modern ears, and the challenge this kind of language presents has led some to simply ‘skip over’ the more difficult psalms (after all, what is one to do with a psalm like 137 … go read it). And at times, the psalmist embraces God’s dominion over everything, and at other times the psalmist wonders why God feels absent.
At times the psalmist sings songs of thanksgiving, and at other times the psalmist expresses disorientation. So yes, at times, the psalmist is a voice of praise, but at other times the psalmist’s voice is one of lament. Rather than God-talk that is closed to anything but praise, the Psalter opens the door for worship language that encompasses the entirety of the human experience. The Book of Psalms (or Psalter) explores worship from all its different emotional angles. Thank the heavens that we have the Psalms!
Said another way, when aspects of our emotional lives are seen as inappropriate for our religious practice, we limit our ability to engage in a full and truly open relationship with God and with each other. That cultural constraint is potentially damaging to us all. After all, if we only see a part of our emotional experiences as “fitting “ for our religious practice, that makes it hard to be whole in our relationship with God. Feelings of gratitude, praise, peace, happiness, thanksgiving, and contentedness, for instance, are associated with “righteousness” and are “good for worship,” whereas feelings of anxiousness, tenseness, anger, sadness, and despair are often associated with “unrighteousness” and are “inappropriate for worship.” Laying aside the many potential reasons for how we got here, the functional result of taking this approach to emotion is a crippling of our personal progression. In modern Christian culture generally and Latter-day Saint culture specifically, however, there is a tendency to assign moral value to specific emotions-particularly when it comes to acts of religious practice.
#Eternal lands house of restoration full#
Because of that, coming to know and become like God for us means that we must seek to also learn to include and incorporate the full spectrum of emotional experiences into our continued theosis. We in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe in a God whose eternal life includes and incorporates the full spectrum of emotions-the theological language here is that we believe in a God that is passible (“capable of feeling or suffering”).
Thus, as a close therapist friend is fond of saying, emotions are neither good nor bad, they are simply information and no different than things like touch and taste.
Emotions are one of the critical ways in which our brain organizes, understands, and anticipates the world around us. The following first appeared in Public Square Magazine.Īs one psychiatrist, Curt Thompson, puts it, emotions are “not opinions to be countered,” rather they are “true experiences that require attention.” This is because human experience is emotional experience, and emotional experience is human experience.
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