It would be a mistake to read into the Psalm’s rhetoric of the soul—in Hebrew, the נפשׁ (nefesh)—Greek conceptions of an invisible, enduring segment of the human creature. That is not in view, not least when the psalmist gives commands to his soul: ‘Praise the Lord, o my soul!’, ‘Awake, my soul!’, and the like.
With this language the psalmist addresses his whole person, his entire life, his very existence. Far from segmenting the human person, the hebraic language of the soul treats him as an integrated unity, though often a unity that must battle to discover itself, to see through the flood of emotion, feeling, and thought that threatens to dissect us rather than to pull us together.
The one hundred sixteenth psalm revels in the fact that YHWH actually hears our cry. Circumstances conspire, too often, to place such an outcome far beyond what sociologists have taught us to understand as our plausibility structures. In distress, we feel alone, abandoned, without hope. That God might actually hear appears ludicrous, after all our groans have banged on his door for so long with no stirring inside.
So does divine rescue occur nearly always as a surprise, no matter how often we have experienced it before. A new crisis, by definition, requires us to walk the path of desperation as though for the first time. We build muscles that help us to do so, a memory that suggests quietly that the path leads somewhere. Yet we walk it always as a new route, threatening in its unresponsive solitude.
When YHWH does indeed hear, act, and deliver, the psalmist becomes competent—once familiar with the pattern—to speak of the soul’s rest:
Return, O my soul, to your rest,
for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you. (Psalm 116:7 NRSV)
Sheol’s incursion into the life of the living—on this the late Bernhard Anderson has been particularly eloquent—is beaten back. One regains health, companions, even the ability to perceive that life in this world—not merely in some longed-for release from pain or some ethereal alternative world—can be good.
This is rest, YHWH’s gift. Alas, it is found at the end of the path just described, not at its outset. Those who find it—even when they dance—always have tear-stained cheeks.
Canter Bridge 
“My souuuuuuul finds rest in God alone.
To readers of Canter Bridge,
What my friend Kelly Liebengood is attempting to accomplish by stringing together these seven words in his artlessly way is to refer to a song he’s recorded on the DEEP WITH YOU album that I’ve reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
Alas, Mr. Liebengood’s experiments in communication normally require the provision of some context and interpretation if they are to have the remotest chance of risking comprehension.
My apologies,
David, for Canter Bridge