- Feb 5, 2002
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Like most people of a certain vintage, my mom loves to talk about how the world has changed over the course of her lifetime. One of her perennial observations involves the kinds of questions students are asked in school. In her day, it was “What did the book say?” In mine, it was “What do you think about the book?” And in our children’s classrooms, it was “How do you feel about the book?”
That’s a pretty accurate picture of how our society has changed over the past three generations. As a culture, we have shifted from objective comprehension and critical thinking to subjective emotional response. We have become a people who talk about how we feel, analyze how we feel, justify and validate how we feel, measure relationships by how they make us feel and generally focus the lion’s share of our attention on our emotions. All of that predisposes us to accept our emotionally driven behavior, or at the very least, to give our feelings more than they are actually due.
For all the emphasis we place on our feelings, we don’t seem any more expert at managing them than our parents or grandparents were. If they overlooked the importance of emotion, we tend to give it too much weight. Everyone is so emotional these days. Just scan the socials. We’re anxious, angry, offended, hurt, and outraged more than ever, about almost everything.
I know sometimes I, too, can be overly emotional. I wish I could say that I’ve lived out my own life and relationships with more rationality than drama, but that isn’t the case. However, I’ve discovered something that really helps: praying the psalter.
Continued below.
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That’s a pretty accurate picture of how our society has changed over the past three generations. As a culture, we have shifted from objective comprehension and critical thinking to subjective emotional response. We have become a people who talk about how we feel, analyze how we feel, justify and validate how we feel, measure relationships by how they make us feel and generally focus the lion’s share of our attention on our emotions. All of that predisposes us to accept our emotionally driven behavior, or at the very least, to give our feelings more than they are actually due.
For all the emphasis we place on our feelings, we don’t seem any more expert at managing them than our parents or grandparents were. If they overlooked the importance of emotion, we tend to give it too much weight. Everyone is so emotional these days. Just scan the socials. We’re anxious, angry, offended, hurt, and outraged more than ever, about almost everything.
I know sometimes I, too, can be overly emotional. I wish I could say that I’ve lived out my own life and relationships with more rationality than drama, but that isn’t the case. However, I’ve discovered something that really helps: praying the psalter.
Continued below.
All the 'feelz': How praying the psalms can help us manage our emotions
The psalms may not canonize our emotions, but they can help to sanctify them as we acknowledge and express how we feel.
www.oursundayvisitor.com
