1 As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants after you, God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? 3 My tears have been my food day and night, while they continually ask me, “Where is your God?” 4 These things I remember, and pour out my soul within me, 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. 5 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. 6 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. 7 Deep calls to deep at the noise of your waterfalls. All your waves and your billows have swept over me. 8 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. 9 I will ask God, my rock, “Why have you forgotten me? Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?” 10 As with a sword in my bones, my adversaries reproach me, while they continually ask me, “Where is your God?” 11 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 — As the Deer Pants for the Water
The psalm of spiritual thirst and of talking back to your own discouragement.
What Psalm 42 Means
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 cast down, my soul, and why are you disturbed within me? 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.
Liturgical Use in the Catholic Church
Psalm 42 is used at the Easter Vigil in connection with baptism, drawing on its thirst imagery, and appears in the Liturgy of the Hours. It is traditionally paired with Psalm 43, which many scholars regard as its second half.
Praying Psalm 42 — A Simple Practice
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.
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