W. David O. Taylor
Far more people than we might imagine suffer from loneliness.
According to a 2018 CIGNA study, loneliness in America has reached “epidemic” levels.1 In 2018, the United Kingdom’s prime minister appointed a Minister of Loneliness to address what was felt to be a serious health issue. Approximately two million people over the age of 75 across England reported going weeks without any meaningful social interaction.2 The World Health Organization now lists the lack of “social support networks” as a determinant of health.3
Loneliness and the Life of Faith
Life apart from deep communal life is bad for our health precisely because God did not mean for us to live apart from meaningful community. The Psalter reflects this. It shows us how the life of faith always takes place before the face of the community.
For the psalmist, the “assembly,” the “congregation,” the “people,” one’s “neighbors” and “friends” are always close at hand.4 There is no hiding from the community; there is in fact no need to hide. The community gets to bear witness to one’s praise and one’s protest, one’s heartfelt petitions and one’s full-throated thanksgivings. The community gets to help us be open and unafraid.
There is no such thing as a modern individualist in the psalms. It is a fundamentally communal book where individuals find their place in the world of faithfulness and faithlessness within the context of the community. Their sins are our sins (Ps. 85). I rejoice because we rejoice (Ps. 106). My lot is bound up in y’all’s lot (Ps. 111).
For the psalmist there is also no autonomous spirituality. There is only a faith that is lived in the company of God’s people. This includes those who have come before us as well as those who will follow after (Ps. 78). It’s a faith that we have “heard and known” (v. 3), and a faith that “we will tell to the coming generation” (v. 4). Faith happens with people (Ps. 40), in presence of the “nations” (Ps. 18), in front of all of creation (Ps. 89).
How else might the Psalms shape our vision of community and inform our faith in practice?
A Psalmic Vision of Community
In the psalms, a person finds her place within a particular community, not a generic community. This community is marked by tribes and families, by friends and strangers alike. In fact, there is no other way to discover one’s identity. This is an important difference between the Psalter’s idea of the self and our modern Western idea. Mays explains that difference this way:
To say “I” meant to speak of one’s group as well as one’s person. We bring our identity to a group, differentiate ourselves within it, join it, accept its ways and opinions, expect the group to nurture the individual and to justify itself to the individual.5
In the psalms, the personal never devolves to the purely idiosyncratic. Nor do individuals discover their identity in opposition to tradition, to the ways of their fathers and mothers, to the “ancient times” (Ps. 68:33 NASB). Faith is not an individualist transaction between God and me. From the perspective of the psalms, the life of faith involves plenty of personal experiences, but they are never a matter of mere private experiences.
One of the most painful things for the psalmist is to be abandoned by a friend. We see this repeatedly throughout the psalms: being betrayed or left alone by a friend. Psalm 88:18 puts it most poignantly: “You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me; my companions are in darkness.”6
With our friends we say, I choose you, because we like the same things, think the same ways, and talk about God similarly. That’s why the rejection of a friend is so painful. But it’s also a friend to whom we can freely confess our sins. It’s a friend whom we first choose to tell our good news.7 Some of us, as Psalm 107 sees it, have wandered in wastelands, while others have sat in darkness; some have become fools, while others have gone out on the sea in ships; still others are at their wits’ end, feeling numb and shut down. Any of these experiences becomes unbearable if we have to bear it alone. But the psalmist shows us that all of it is bearable because the community bears it with us. It’s not just for the psalmist to bear alone.
We choose our friends, but we do not choose our congregation. A congregation is a specific kind of community. We may share certain theological convictions; we may be drawn by particular cultural preferences; we may be united by language or ethnicity. But if it’s a healthy congregation, it will include people who don’t like what we like, who don’t think like we do, and who talk about God in ways that we find weird, dull, or off-putting.
This is a deeply good thing.
When we make our confessions “in the assembly of the people,” we learn what it truly means to be faith-filled, because it requires a tremendous amount of trust to be honest to God in front of people who may not particularly like us or understand us. In the Psalter it is such a community that sees it all: our sadness and joy, our hopes and anxieties. Such a community bears witness to the conflicts, finitude, fallibility, and suffering of life.8
Conclusion
For all of us, the psalms show us a picture of true community and invite us to embody such a community, where things can be remembered and not forgotten, and things can be said out loud: joyful outbursts of thanksgiving, testimonies of rescue, confessions of sin, admissions of weakness. In the end, the psalms offer us a way for all things to be told in community—both those things that we would gladly announce from the hilltops and those things that we might prefer to keep secret—so that God might heal us and lead us “in the way everlasting” (Ps. 139:24).
This article is adapted from W. David O. Taylor’s book Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide for Life (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2020).
W. David O. Taylor is assistant professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary as well as the director of Brehm Texas, an initiative that seeks the renewal of the church through the arts. He is the author of Glimpses of the New Creation: Worship and the Formative Power of the Arts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019) and The Theater of God’s Glory: Calvin, Creation and the Liturgical Arts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017). His forthcoming book with Baker Academic is provisionally titled The Glory of the Body: An Introduction to the Physical Body in Worship. In 2016, he produced a short film on the psalms with Bono and Eugene Peterson. He lives in Austin with his wife, Phaedra, a visual artist and gardener, his daughter, Blythe, and son, Sebastian. He tweets @wdavidotaylor and posts on Instagram @davidtaylor_theologian.
Image: James Tissot, David Danced Before the Lord with All His Might
- “New Cigna Study Reveals Loneliness at Epidemic Levels in America,” CIGNA, May 1, 2018, https://www.cigna.com/newsroom/news-releases/2018/new-cigna-study-reveals-loneliness-at-epidemic-levels-in-america.[↩]
- “Minister for Loneliness Appointed to Continue Jo Cox’s Work,” BBC News, January 17, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42708507.[↩]
- Jane E. Brody, “Shaking Off Loneliness,” New York Times, May 13, 2013, https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/shaking-off-loneliness/ (“‘Is it any wonder that we turn to ice cream or other fatty foods when we’re sitting at home feeling all alone in the world?’ Dr. Cacioppo said in his well-documented book Loneliness, written with William Patrick. ‘We want to soothe the pain we feel by mainlining sugar and fat content to the pleasure centers of the brain, and absent of self-control, we go right at it.’ He explained that lonely individuals tend to do whatever they can to make themselves feel better, if only for the moment. They may overeat, drink too much, smoke, speed or engage in indiscriminate sex”).[↩]
- In the King James Version, for example: congregation (21 times), assembly (4 times), people (122 times), neighbor (10 times), friend (4 times).[↩]
- James L. Mays, The Lord Reigns: A Theological Handbook to the Psalms (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 52.[↩]
- Cf. Pss. 38:11; 41:9.[↩]
- As Psalm 22:22 says, “Here’s the story I’ll tell my friends when they come to worship, and punctuate it with Hallelujahs: Shout Hallelujah, you God-worshipers” (MSG).[↩]
- Mays, The Lord Reigns, 42–43; and James L. Mays, Psalms: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 66–69.[↩]