Psalm 42: As the Deer Pants for the Water

Psalm 42 is a prayer from far away. The psalmist says he remembers God “from the land of the Jordan, the heights of Hermon, from the hill Mizar” (verse 6): the headwaters of the Jordan below Mount Hermon, a long way north of Jerusalem. He used to lead the pilgrims up to it: “how I used to go with the crowd, and led them to God’s house, with the voice of joy and praise, a multitude keeping a holy day” (verse 4). Now he eats his tears, and people ask him, “Where is your God?” (verse 3).

The poem moves in two waves, each ending with the same refrain, and Psalm 43 adds a third:

• Verses 1–5. Thirst for God, tears, the memory of the festival crowd, and the first refrain.
• Verses 6–11. Despair, the roaring waters, a song in the night, the question “why have you forgotten me?” and the refrain again.
• Psalm 43. A plea to be brought back, “to the altar of God, to God, my exceeding joy,” and the refrain a third time.

Its message is not that the thirst goes away. It is that a person can be honest about despair and still hope in God, both at once, and say so out loud. The Catechism says the Psalms’ prayer is “inseparably personal and communal” (CCC 2586): this one is a single exile’s, and it has been the whole Church’s ever since.

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?

Psalm 42:1–2

A deer in a dry season, looking for a stream bed that still has water in it. The comparison is physical on purpose: this is thirst, not admiration. And the object is exact, “the living God,” the one who is alive and can be met, not an idea of God.

The Church hears in it the thirst that runs through the whole Bible. Isaiah: “Come, everyone who thirsts, to the waters!” Jesus at the feast: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink!” and on the Cross: “I am thirsty!” The Catechism turns the psalm around: “Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him” (CCC 2560).

That is why the Easter Vigil sings these verses before the baptisms. The water the catechumens go down into is the answer to the deer’s thirst: “but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life” (John 4:14).

St. Augustine, preaching on the psalm, repeats an ancient piece of natural history, that the stag “destroys serpents, and after the killing of serpents, it is inflamed with thirst yet more violent.” Whatever one makes of the zoology, his point stands: “The serpents are your vices, destroy the serpents of iniquity,” and the thirst for God grows.

The refrain comes three times, and each time it is slightly different.

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.

Psalm 42:5

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.

Psalm 42:11

Psalm 43 ends with it once more, closing on “my Savior, my helper, and my God.”

The psalmist is talking to himself, and not kindly or cruelly but firmly. The first half is an honest question: why? The second half is an instruction: hope. He does not wait to feel hopeful before he tells himself to hope. Augustine heard it as a conversation between a man and his own soul: “Still Hope in God, is his answer to the soul that disquiets him.”

The refrain also moves. In verse 5 God’s help is “of his presence,” something outside him. In verse 11 it is “the saving help of my countenance,” his own face, and in Psalm 43 God is “my Savior, my helper, and my God.” The situation has not changed. The one praying has come closer.

Deep calls to deep at the noise of your waterfalls. All your waves and your billows have swept over me.

Psalm 42:7

Near Hermon the Jordan begins as torrents, and the psalmist, standing by them, hears one deep answering another. The water he longed for in verse 1 is now over his head. It is the most exact line in Scripture for being overwhelmed, and it is still addressed to God: your waterfalls, your waves. Even the flood belongs to him.

The LORD 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.

Psalm 42:8

Verse 8 stands in the middle of the second wave like a rock in the stream. It is the only verse in the psalm that uses God’s name, the LORD, and it promises nothing about the circumstances, only company: kindness by day, a song at night. Many people pray it last thing before sleep.

Not in the clinical sense, but it describes a great deal of what depression feels like: tears day and night, a soul in despair, the sense of being swept under, the question “why have you forgotten me?” That is why so many people who are depressed find it.

Two things need saying plainly. Depression is an illness, and it is treated. If a low mood has settled on you and will not lift, or you can no longer sleep, eat or work, the first step is a doctor or a licensed mental-health professional, and the psalm goes with you, not instead of them. The Church has never taught that praying harder replaces medicine. And despair in the psalm is not a sin or a failure of faith. The Catechism says that illness “can lead to anguish, self-absorption, sometimes even despair and revolt against God” (CCC 1501); the Bible is full of faithful people who reached the bottom. Elijah under his juniper tree prayed, “It is enough. Now, O LORD, take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4). Christ in Gethsemane said, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38), and before his Passion, “Now my soul is troubled” (John 12:27), words close to this psalm.

Almost every reader notices that Psalm 43 finishes what Psalm 42 began. It picks up the same complaint, uses the same refrain to end, and, unusually for this part of the Psalter, has no heading of its own. Many scholars treat the two as one poem, and the Liturgy of the Hours prays them on consecutive mornings.

Psalm 43 is where the thirst turns into a journey:

Oh, send out your light and your truth. Let them lead me. Let them bring me to your holy hill, to your tents. Then I will go to the altar of God, to God, my exceeding joy. I will praise you on the harp, God, my God.

Psalm 43:3–4

For centuries the priest said this psalm, in Latin, at the foot of the altar at the start of the Tridentine Mass (though not at Requiem Masses): Judica me, Deus, with the servers answering Introibo ad altare Dei, “I will go in to the altar of God.” It is still said wherever the traditional Latin Mass is celebrated. The exile’s longing to get back to the Temple became the priest’s preparation to approach the altar.

The heading gives it to a family, not a single author: “For the Chief Musician. A contemplation by the sons of Korah.” The sons of Korah were Levites, Temple musicians; Chronicles records the Korahites standing up “stood up to praise the LORD, the God of Israel, with an exceedingly loud voice” (2 Chronicles 20:19). Twelve psalms carry their name, and Psalm 42 opens the second of the Psalter’s five books with them.

“Contemplation” translates the Hebrew maskil, a word of uncertain meaning that seems to mark a psalm for reflection or instruction. The poem speaks in the first person singular, one voice, which is why it sounds so personal: an exile in the north, a Temple singer who can no longer go up to sing.

Other psalms name other authors in their headings: David most often, but also “A Psalm by Asaph.” (Psalm 73), “A Prayer by Moses, the man of God.” (Psalm 90), and Solomon (Psalm 127). The Catechism says the psalms were “gradually collected into the five books of the Psalter” over the centuries from David onward (CCC 2585).

• The Easter Vigil. When there are baptisms, Psalms 42 and 43 are sung after the seventh reading, with the refrain “Like a deer that longs for running streams, my soul longs for you, my God” (Lectionary 41).
• Funerals. The same verses are among the ten responsorial psalms offered for funeral Masses (Lectionary 1013) and among the four for the funerals of baptised children (1019). For praying for those who have died, see prayers for the dead.
• Weekdays. Monday of the third week of Lent, Monday of the fourth week of Easter, and a Saturday in Ordinary Time.
• The Liturgy of the Hours. Morning Prayer on Monday of Week II; Psalm 43 on Tuesday. In the Rule of St. Benedict it was sung at the night office on Mondays.

A note on numbers: the Lectionary cites these verses as Psalm 42:2–3 and so on, because the Bible translation it uses counts the heading as verse 1. The World English Bible used on this page starts at the first line of the poem, so its verse numbers run one lower. In the Douay-Rheims and the Vulgate the psalm is Psalm 41.

Composers have loved it. Palestrina’s motet Sicut cervus sets the opening in Latin; Handel wrote As pants the hart; Mendelssohn’s Psalm 42 is a full cantata.

Psalm 42 opens with the image most people know: a deer panting for streams of water, and a soul thirsting for God in the same way.

It is a picture of need rather than devotion. A thirsty animal is not admiring the water. What follows makes the setting plain: the psalmist is far from the temple, taunted by people asking where his God is, and remembering how he used to lead the festival procession. The thirst is sharpened by memory of having once been satisfied, which is a specific and recognisable kind of pain.

The psalm's most useful feature is what it does next. Twice, it turns and addresses itself: “Why are you in despair, my soul? Why are you disturbed within me?” Then it answers: “Hope in God!” The psalmist is not receiving comfort from outside. He is speaking to his own discouragement, out loud, in the second person.

That is a genuinely different model of prayer from asking God to change how you feel. It treats the downcast soul as something you can talk to rather than only something you are, and the Church has recommended the technique ever since.

The honest part is that the psalm does not report the mood lifting. It ends with the same question and the same answer, which is why it is trusted by anyone who has had to say a thing more than once.

At the Easter Vigil, when baptism is celebrated, verses of Psalms 42 and 43 are sung after the seventh reading, with the refrain “Like a deer that longs for running streams, my soul longs for you, my God.” The same verses are among the psalms offered at funerals, including the funerals of children, and on weekdays in Lent and Eastertide. In the Liturgy of the Hours Psalm 42 is the first psalm of Morning Prayer on Monday of Week II, and Psalm 43 opens Tuesday’s. The two are traditionally read as one poem.

When you are low, do what the psalm does: say the words to yourself out loud rather than only thinking them. Speaking to your own discouragement in the second person feels odd exactly once. Notice too that the psalm repeats itself because the first attempt did not work, which makes it a permission slip for praying the same thing again tomorrow.