The short Psalm 131 is built around a single image, a weaned child resting with his or her mother:
Lord, my heart is not proud;
my eyes are not haughty.
I do not get involved with things
too great or too wondrous for me.
Instead, I have calmed and quieted my soul
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like a weaned child.
The image of a weaned child, rather than a nursing child, is interesting. We're further along the developmental trajectory. Not a newborn infant, but a toddler who is walking around, talking, and eating solid food. The metaphor is less about dependency than trust. What we see in Psalm 131 is what psychologists would call a "secure attachment." The weaned child experiences their mother as a secure base and a haven of safety.
The Psalm connects this trust with humility: "My heart is not proud; my eyes are not haughty." There's also an experience of inner peace and tranquility: "I have calmed and quieted my soul." As I describe in The Shape of Joy Psalm 131 is depicting a "quiet ego."
The story I tell in The Shape of Joy is how transcendence is good for you. The modern self has collapsed in upon itself, becoming introverted, ruminating, self-referential, and morbidly self-absorbed. We are incurvatus in se, as Augustine put it. Curved in upon ourselves. And there are mental health consequences of this curvature. Instead of quiet, the ego is loud, agitated, unstable, and reactive.
Consequently, we need to make an "outward turn" to become excurvatus ex se, curved outward to make contact with a reality bigger and other than our own. The science of awe, humility, gratitude, meaning in life, and spirituality, in their relation to mental health and well-being, all converge upon this story. Joy has a shape.
And that's the shape we see in the metaphor of Psalm 131. Humility and inner quietude flow out of a relation of trust. That's the key. The story I share in The Shape of Joy is largely descriptive, connecting the correlational dots of positive psychology to bring its main, and often unstated, conclusion into view. Because a clear story has emerged. Trouble is, if you read a book on the science of gratitude, the research on awe, or the effectiveness of humble leadership, you can miss the forest for the trees. You won't see how all these disparate research literatures, along with their outward facing self-improvement podcasts and books, reach the same conclusion. Transcendence is good for you. It's like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each one touching a different part of an elephant and arguing about what the creature is, since each describes only the piece he feels—the trunk is a snake, the tusk is a spear, the leg is a tree. Each holds a bit of the truth but can't see the unified whole. The research on gratitude, humility, awe, and meaning in life is like this, each book and podcast a blind man describing only a part of the whole. We fail to see the elephant—transcendence—because we consume the science bit by bit. The goal of The Shape of Joy is the bring the elephant into view.
Still, as I said, that was largely a descriptive task. It doesn't really answer the question about why transcendence is good for us. That's an explanatory, rather than descriptive, question. And since I didn't want to get too preachy in The Shape of Joy I didn't push too hard in this direction. But the explanation is the one we find in Psalm 131. Specifically, the self is inherently relational. There is no isolated ego or self. We exist only in relation. Thus, I can only come to know, define, and explore myself through relation. Self-help, self-exploration, and self-actualization are, at root, delusional, resting upon a false ontology and anthropology. Consequently, it stands to reason that when the self cuts itself off from relation, and tries to explore, define, and know itself in isolation, it will become disordered and hallucinatory. Just look around at the world. That’s what we see at the heart of our modern mental health crisis—disordered, hallucinatory selves.
Transcendence is good for us because it restores relation. And at the heart of the Christian vision of reality is the confession that this relation is, ontologically, personal. A Martin Buber put it, our relation to reality is not I-It, but I-Thou. But actually, object-relations theory and Psalm 131 would reverse this. Thou precedes I. The relation is Thou-I. Relation is prior to the self. The child only comes to know herself in relation to the mother. Self-definition assumes relation. The Thou, the maternal relation, is prior to the development of the self, the I.
That is the explanation about why transcendence is good for us. Our flourishing flows out of a trusting relation with reality. Our I comes into being in relation to a prior, parental Thou. And in trusting this relation our souls become like a weaned child, peaceful, quiet and at rest.
