The oldest cure for doomscrolling in one lyric

For nearly 20 years, the same sentence has greeted me every morning.

It first appeared on a yellow Post-it note stuck to the door of my office in Nashville. When my wife and I moved to Montana, the note came with us. Eventually, the paper curled and the ink faded, so my wife had the words beautifully rendered in calligraphy and framed.

A culture that ceases to ponder the character of God will eventually begin reinventing the character of man.

Today, they hang on the wall in my office, where I see them before I begin each day’s work.

The sentence comes from Catherine Winkworth’s 19th-century translation of Joachim Neander’s 17th-century hymn, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty”: “Ponder anew what the Almighty can do, if with His love He befriend thee.”

The word ponder is surprisingly rare in our hymnody. Yet Neander was hardly the first to call God’s people to this discipline. More than a thousand years earlier, an ancient text from the Liturgy of St. James, rooted in the worship of the early church, gave us the hymn we know as “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand; ponder nothing earthly minded …”

Silence and pondering belong together. Silence quiets the noise. Pondering fixes the mind on what is true.

Our culture has become proficient at neither.

Relentless conflict eventually exhausts everyone. We were not created merely to react to the world around us. We were created to contemplate the God who rules over it.

Ask friends, family, or neighbors how they are doing, and many will answer with the same word: “Tired.”

Fatigue has become shorthand for nearly every kind of cultural exhaustion: political, racial, social, even digital. The causes differ, but the word keeps returning. We have become exhausted by the demand to react to every controversy, and in the process we have nearly forgotten how to ponder.

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That discipline has quietly eroded. We accumulate information without assembling it. We have access to more knowledge than any generation in history, yet seem to spend less time fitting those pieces together into wisdom. We react to isolated events without considering the larger story. We spend more time contemplating the latest controversy than contemplating the unchanging character of Almighty God.

Joachim Neander built his life around a different discipline.

He frequently retreated into a valley outside Düsseldorf to pray and contemplate the majesty of God revealed in creation. That contemplation eventually found its way into his hymns.

The valley where he so often prayed and wrote came to bear his name: Neander’s Tal, or Neander’s Valley.

Nearly two centuries after his death, laborers uncovered ancient human remains there. Scientists named the discovery for the place where it was found: Neanderthal.

Today, the word has become a pejorative. We use it to describe someone as backward, primitive, or unenlightened.

The irony is striking.

Long before the world associated that name with fossils, it belonged to a man who saw with remarkable clarity. While others would one day search that valley to understand where man came from, Joachim Neander walked those same hills contemplating the One from whom man came.

That irony reaches beyond Neander’s name. The habits that shape a people’s souls eventually shape their civilization.

America’s founders inherited centuries of reflection on the character of God, the nature of man, the meaning of liberty, the demands of justice, and the proper limits of civil government. Their constitutional order reflected two convictions especially important to the American experiment: Rights do not originate with government, and human beings possess great dignity while remaining profoundly capable of abusing power.

Those convictions help explain both the founders’ insistence on individual liberty and their determination to restrain political authority.

At its best, America bore the fruit of generations that had pondered questions larger than politics itself.

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A civilization eventually follows the direction of its gaze.

A culture that ceases to ponder the character of God will eventually begin reinventing the character of man. Gratitude gives way to grievance. Stewardship gives way to entitlement. And politics begins carrying burdens it was never built to bear.

Which brings me back to the sentence hanging on my office wall. Tomorrow morning, I’ll walk into my office, glance at those familiar words, and begin another day: “Ponder anew what the Almighty can do, if with His love He befriend thee.”

The noise of the moment loses some of its authority. Headlines surrender some of their urgency. The fatigue begins to dissipate. And before long, pondering gives way to praise.

Perhaps that is why Neander ended the hymn where such pondering inevitably leads: “Let the Amen sound from His people again; gladly forever adore Him.”

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