Dealing With Feelings

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Even to those of us, like myself, not much given to emotion, the thought sometimes comes: 'I shouldn't be feeling like this.'

This may or may not be true. The fact remains, I am feeling like this. What do I do?

Basically, there are three options. The order in which they seem to occur to us is first expression, then repression, and finally confession.

Expression - pressing out

Expressing feelings is not always appropriate. But it is probably appropriate much more often than we are inclined to think.

Even those of us (again, like myself) who are not of Anglo-Saxon ancestry live in a culture where the prevalent values are Anglo-Saxon, and so mostly lack models for the proper expression of strong feelings. It is not the fault of our parents, or their parents; it goes much further back.

In AD 98, not long after the completion of the New Testament, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote his Germania, about the way of life of the Germanic pagans who lived north of the Rhine. According to his account of their funeral customs, they believed that 'A woman may decently express her grief in public; a man should nurse his in his heart.' (Germania XXVII).

There is no telling how long these people had believed this by AD 98. But when contact with Christianity brought the literacy that enabled them to speak for themselves, some five hundred years later, nothing had changed.

Nor has it since. Few men of Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage are psychologically capable of crying in public, or even in private; I have not done so since 1982 despite several experiences of deep grief. For fourteen centuries, Germanic people have known that Jesus wept. But if anyone has noticed that this particular emperor has, in fact, no clothes on, shame has closed his mouth or his cry has not been generally taken up.

After more than two millenia, is it too late? Perhaps not; such lengths of time are small in God's sight, and we have a large enough non-Anglo-Saxon presence among us now for that attitude to start to change. Certainly many women today have greater, not lesser, respect for a man who can weep.

Should there, then, be limits to the expression of emotion? I believe so - though I believe they should be set wider than at present.

Jesus wept, expressing grief; he also expressed love, joy, compassion and even anger (not, however, over hurts done to him). But lust, pride, greed, envy, hatred, and 'the anger of man' which 'does not bring about the righteous life God desires ' (Jas.1:20) are condemned in the Scriptures. Clearly, we ought not to express them; but if they rise up in us, or if a legitimate emotion does so in a situation where people would be offended if we express it - what are we do to? First, what do we usually do?

Repression - pressing back

When expression is blocked, by conscience or convention, our usual reaction is to repress or push down our feelings. It is hard to think of a more dangerous response. According to psychologists, when we repress a feeling, it is no longer under our conscious control. Repression doesn't dispose of it, it only sweeps it under the carpet, and eventually the carpet will develop a lump which we will trip over.

When we push our emotions down, they have a disturbing tendency to bob up again, like ice in a drink (or as if the enemy has got underneath and is shoving them.) They may appear in different forms; not only dreams, but spiritual and physical problems or even disease can arise through severely repressed emotions, so much are we one organism of body, soul and spirit. But in milder cases we often get the 'dust in the wind' effect - just the same thing back again, only out of control.

Only God can break the cycle - hence our third response.

Confession - 'pressing up'

The biblican word 'confess' means much more than to admit guilt. It is homologeo, 'to say the same thing' - to agree with God. Romans 10:9 applies it to the statement, 'Jesus is Lord'. It implies an openness elsewhere expressed in terms of 'walking in the light'.' (1 John 2:7)

So rather than jumping on our feelings with the attitude, 'I shouldn't feel that' - shove - we come before God and begin by agreeing with him - confessing - that that is what we are feeling.

I came to this realisation through the Psalms, a daily channel of God's strength - especially in difficult times. Part of the benefit I gain from them is that, praying to God in the words of these men, I can express my feelings far better than I could in my own words.

They come out of a culture where people tore their clothes, scattered dust on their heads, and sat for hours appalled when we would have pursed our lips and shaken our heads gently. They were not afraid to feel things strongly, or to express them; and they knew that God understood, that it was all right to tell him how they really felt.

They did not know of him incarnate; yet they knew of his compassion, and by faith realised that they could pour their hearts out to him without reserve, and he would understand. Nor did they expect him to rebuke them for these displays of feeling because of a lack of faith or courage. It is we who lack faith and courage, hiding from God like our forebears in the Garden.

Which of us can say with David, 'All my longings lie open before you, O Lord; my sighing is not hidden from you' (Ps 38:9)? Or dares to come before God and ask, 'How long, O Lord, how long?' (Ps 5:3)?. The whole of Psalm 6 is well worth reading, first for its intensity of confession ('Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am faint; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are in agony. My soul is in anguish . . . I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with tears'), but also for the strong confidence of its close: 'Away from me, all you who do evil, for the Lord has heard my weeping. The Lord has heard my cry for mercy; the Lord accepts my prayer.'

The great praying men and women of the Old Testament, like Hannah, Jeremiah, Daniel and above all David, avoided two mistakes we often make.

First, they did not think that they had to be in a suitably religious and reserved frame of mind in order to come before God in prayer. Their God was not that small, nor was he that far away. He could listen to distress and agonised intensity; he could hear through groanings and tears, which the writer to the Hebrews identifies with 'reverent submission' (Heb 5:7).

Consequently, prayer was their first refuge - not their last resort.

But secondly, they did not limit his ability to deal with what was tearing them apart. The book of Lamentations, perhaps the most horrible book in the Bible, comes from an eyewitness of the worst hour of God's chosen people- the captivity and destruction of the Holy City.

Nothing is held back in the mourning of the personified city, and the pain is intensified still further by this identification of the poet whom some say is Jeremiah, the Weeping Prophet - with the city. Yet the writer never falls completely into despair. The mist of blood and tears never fully closes out the light.

A hint is given by the structuring of the poem around the letters of the Hebrew alphabet - which is no necessary sign of lesser grief, any more than rhyme would be in an English poem, but implies an order somewhere beyond the chaos and destruction. And almost half-way through it is made explicit, in words we often sing complacently, forgetting what a testimony they are of faith in the midst of what must have seemed like the end of the world. They are vivid in their context.

'He has broken my teeth with gravel; he has trampled me in the dust. I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is.

'So I say, 'My splendour is gone, and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.' I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.

'Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

'I say to myself, "The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him." The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord' (Lam 3:16-26).

Repressing such grief, or even much lesser feelings, will break your heart. Expressing it may not be possible. But if we confess it to the Lord, it becomes his problem. Unlike repressed emotion, it is no longer there. It is no longer in control - God is - and so it cannot cause you to sin.

I still have trouble expressing emotion; with God's grace, if I'm prepared to die to my old nature, that can be dealt with. Meanwhile, if I'm ever going to be honest with others about what I feel, I'll have to start by admitting it to myself and God. Pushing it down will only drag me down after it.