The Quiet Soul

After thirteen days in the Psalms -- through praise and lament and trust and honest wrestling -- we come to the one that takes the least space and perhaps requires the most of us.

Psalm 131 is three verses long. It was written by David and it belongs to the Psalms of Ascent, the pilgrim songs sung on the way to Jerusalem. But unlike many of the others, this one does not describe a journey or a crisis or a deliverance. It describes an interior condition. A soul that has arrived somewhere.

What David Is Not Claiming

I want to start with what this is not, because it is easy to misread.

David is not claiming ignorance. He is one of the most intellectually engaged writers in the Psalter -- he wrestles with cosmic questions, with theodicy, with the nature of God and the complexity of human experience. He is not saying: I have stopped thinking about hard things.

He is not claiming passivity or disengagement. David was a king, a warrior, a man with enormous responsibilities and enormous troubles. He is not describing a person who has retreated from the demands of life into a spiritual bubble.

He is describing something more specific and more radical: a soul that has stopped striving for control over the things that are too great and marvellous for it. A person who has learned -- and the learning is the key word, because it did not come naturally -- to stop white-knuckling the things they cannot manage.

The Weaned Child Image

The image he chooses is one of the most tender in Scripture. A weaned child with its mother. A weaned child -- not a nursing infant who is content because they are being fed -- but a child who has been through the transition, who no longer demands to nurse, who is simply at rest in the presence of the mother without needing anything from her in this moment.

The contentment is not dependent on receiving. It is the contentment of presence itself. Of being with someone who is safe and known and home. The child is quiet not because all needs are met but because the relationship is enough.

That is the soul David is describing. Not a soul that has no needs, or no questions, or no unresolved hard things. A soul that has found that the presence of God is enough. That being with Him is the good thing, independent of what He is giving or doing in this particular moment.

How You Get There

I have calmed and quieted my soul. The verbs are active -- he has done something. This did not happen to him. He did not wake up one day and discover that his soul was suddenly at rest. He has learned, through the discipline of returning again and again to God in all the Psalms we have read this week, to put the striving down.

The 13 days that preceded this moment in our series are part of how you get to Psalm 131. You get there through the honest praise of Psalm 8, through the lament of Psalm 42, through the dark unresolved night of Psalm 88, through the trust of Psalm 23, through the long view of Psalm 73. The quiet soul is not the beginning of the journey. It is what the journey produces in you, over time, if you keep returning to the Shepherd who knows you.