A Weaned Child With Its Mother

Psalm 131 is three verses long. That is the whole thing.

LORD, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child. Let Israel hope in the LORD from henceforth and for ever.Psalm 131:1-3, King James Version

It is one of the Songs of Degrees, the group of psalms sung by people going up the road toward Jerusalem, which means it was made to be carried and repeated on foot. That matters. This is not a psalm somebody wrote in a study. It is a walking song.

And in the middle of it there is one word that decides what the whole psalm is about, and most people read past it because it seems like a detail.

Weaned.

He does not say as a child with his mother. He says as a child that is weaned of his mother. And that is a completely different picture from the one people usually imagine.

A nursing child is with its mother for something. It is there because it needs to be fed, and if the feeding stops the crying starts, and the whole arrangement is organized around a want.

A weaned child is with its mother for the mother.

There is nothing to get. The transaction has been removed. The child is on the lap because that is where it wants to be, and it has come out the other side of a process that was not pleasant to arrive there.

The quieting is something he did

Now look at the verb in verse two, because it is not what people expect from a psalm about rest.

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself.

That is active. He did something. The psalm does not describe a peace that arrived and settled over him; it describes a man who quieted himself, which is language for repeated effort. The wording carries the sense of a thing done more than once, the way you settle a child who keeps getting up.

That is worth saying out loud to anybody whose mind will not stop, because the usual advice is to relax and the usual result is failure, and this psalm does not ask for relaxing. It describes work.

You are not required to carry what is too high for you. Psalm 131:1 says things too high for me without ever calling those things bad, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that from becoming a judgment on the size of a person's mind.

I want to stay on that phrase, because it is doing something careful.

Great matters, or things too high for me. He is not saying the great matters do not matter. He is not saying nobody should think about them. He is saying they are above his ceiling and he has stopped reaching.

And notice what he does with his eyes in verse one. Nor mine eyes lofty. The whole psalm is about where a person's attention goes. He is not describing a change of belief. He is describing a change of gaze.

You have been reaching at a height that was never assigned to you, and the psalm calls that a matter of eyes rather than a matter of failure. The written word puts the eyes and the great matters in one line, and the same Spirit who joined them is the reason this is about attention and not about intelligence.

Let me name what the running mind actually does at night, because I think you know this better than I could describe it.

It is not usually solving anything. It is rehearsing. The same conversation, the same decision, the same three outcomes, in the same order, at a slightly different angle each time. And there is a belief underneath the rehearsing, which almost nobody says out loud, and the belief is that the running is holding something together. That if you stopped, something would come apart that your attention has been the only thing preventing.

Psalm 131 is not written to make you feel better about that. It is written by a man who put it down.

You were never the mechanism holding it together, and there is no verse in this psalm where the quieting causes a collapse. Psalm 131:2 has a man settling himself and nothing falling over, and it is His Spirit who makes that a real experiment for somebody who has been afraid to stop.

And then the third verse, and it changes the address entirely.

Let Israel hope in the LORD from henceforth and for ever.Psalm 131:3, King James Version

He turns and speaks to a nation. Two verses of the most personal, interior quiet in the whole songbook, and then he hands it to everybody, out loud, on the road.

Which tells you that the quiet in verses one and two was never a private trick. It was something he thought was available.

You have been handed something out of somebody else's evening and told it belongs to a whole people. Psalm 131:3 turns from my soul to let Israel, and the same Spirit who preserved that turn is the reason this is an offer and not a description of a temperament you were not born with.