Scunnered!
Amongst the most expressive Scottish words is the near onomatopoeic 'scunnered'. One dictionary definition is itself a literary gem, "bereft of any lust for life". Now that's a bit extreme, but the best words are the ones that have the volume turned up.
Scunnered is an inner negativity about the way life happens to be, and the mood is pervasive and invasive and affects motivation, drains energy levels, impairs capacity for joy and therefore robs life of one of its primary drivers, a sense of purpose. Most times being scunnered is temporary; a sleep, a meal, the encouragement of friends, the right music, a glimpse of beauty, can restore something of our muchness. Or perhaps nothing other than passing time and the slow recovery of the sense that life is a gift too vital to be ignored or suffocated under a blanket of complaint.
I suspect some of the Psalms were written out of a sense of scunneration. Technically called psalms of lament, they are poetic complaints to God about the way life is and the sense of being under siege by circumstances which frustrate our hopes, exhaust our energies or threaten our happiness. In such Psalms the rhythm always moves from lament and complaint to praise and thanksgiving. Why? Because faith is the synchronic capacity to look at life with realism and look to God with hope. There is an element of defiance in faith, a strong undercurrent of resistance to that nexus of negative emotions we call scunneration.
The mindset of the Psalmist poet is a complex combination of both resistance to what troubles and diminishes us, and surrender to the God we have learned to trust with our real significance. The cure for inner negativity is not mere positivity, like willing ourselves to believe against all the evidence that life is a struggle right now, that life is fine. Trust in God is not a denial that life is hard and has enmeshed us in an emotional downer.
In a powerful balancing of question and answer the Psalmist poet both faces the reality of life as it is, and asserts the reality that places life as it is against a different horizon of possibilities. And it is all condensed into that one small horizon-stretching word "yet".
"Why are you cast down, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him
my Saviour and my God.
Being scunnered is a natural response to what feels like the chronic and relentless frustrations of life, large and small, serious and trivial, unexpected and predictable. Hope in God is not denial of their reality, but denial of their finality. Somewhere in all the frustration, trouble and inner negativity there is a "yet", a reality that is ultimate and promised, and that will turn scunneration to praise. That's what hope does. It gives us a reference point beyond penultimate of present circumstances. Hope points us to the God whose love is ultimate, whose purposes are on a different horizon which as yet we don't see, except that against the first slivers of dawn is the silhouette of a cross illumined by the resurrection promise of early morning.
All of this comes out of reflecting on the small Sabbath poem of Wendell Berry, and noticing the determined but still tentative hopefulness he invests in the word "perhaps". Like a modern day Psalmist poet of wisdom he gives us the anatomy of hope. Desire, love, gratitude and joy are each and together the antithesis of being scunnered. The chain linking of desire perhaps love perhaps gratitude perhaps joy ends in the Maker, and rest. In all the penultimacy of what scunners us, the promised ultimacy of desire fulfilled in love, suffused with gratitude and resting in joy, the joy of God.
Learn by little the desire for all things
which perhaps is not desire at all
but undying love which perhaps
is not love at all but gratitude
for the being of all things which
perhaps is not gratitude at all
but the maker's joy in what is made,
the joy in which we come to rest.
Wendell Berry, This Day. Collected and New Sabbath Poems, page 312
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