• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 791 0

of God (“How long, O Lord, will you hide yourself forever?” [Ps. 89:46]), the psalms were largely excluded from Sunday worship when I was a girl, except for a handful of the more joyful ones selected as suitable for responsorial reading. The wild and often contradictory poetry of the psalms is still mostly censored out of Christian worship in America, though Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and other mainstream Protestants hear snippets every Sunday. In worship services that lack a liturgical structure one hears less of the exacting music of poetry than lax, discursive prose that provides the illusion of control over what happens in church, and in the human heart. And the Pentecostal churches that allow for more emotional response in their worship try to exercise control by sentimentalizing emotions. Their “psalms” are likely to be pop tunes about Jesus.

Not having been to church for some twenty years following high school, I rediscovered the psalms by accident, through my unexpected attraction to Benedictine liturgy, of which the psalms are the mainstay. A Benedictine community recites or sings psalms at morning, noon, and evening prayer, going through the entire Psalter every three or four weeks. As I began to immerse myself in monastic liturgy, I found that I was also immersed in poetry and was grateful to find that the poetic nature of the psalms, their constant movement between the mundane and the exalted, means, as British Benedictine Sebastian Moore has said, that “God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systematic theology,” and also that the images of the psalms, “rough-hewn from earthy experience, [are] absolutely different from formal prayer.”

I also discovered, in two nine-month sojourns with the St. John’s community, that as Benedictine prayer rolls on, as daily as marriage and washing dishes, it tends to sweep away the concerns of systematic theology and church doctrine. All of that is there, as a kind of scaffolding, but the psalms demand engagement, they ask you to read them with your whole self, praying, as St. Benedict says, “in such a way that our minds are in harmony with our voices.” Experiencing the psalms in this away allowed me gradually to let go of that childhood God who had set an impossible standard for both formal prayer and faith, convincing me that religion wasn’t worth exploring because I couldn’t “do it right.”

I learned that when you go to church several times a day, every day, there is no way you can “do it right.” You are not always going to sit up straight, let alone think holy thoughts. You’re not going to wear your best clothes but whatever isn’t in the dirty clothes basket. You come to the Bible’s great “book of praises” through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you may feel like hell, you sing anyway. To your surprise, you find that the psalms do not deny your true feelings but allow you to reflect on them, right in front of God and everyone. I soon realized, during my first residency at St. John’s, that this is not easy to do on a daily basis. Before, I’d always been a guest in a monastery for a week or less, and the experience was often a high. But now I was in it for a nine-month haul, and it was a struggle for me to go to choir when I didn’t feel like it, especially if I was depressed (which, of course, is when I most needed to be there). I took great solace in knowing that everyone there had been through this struggle, and that some of them were struggling now with the absurdity, the monotony of repeating the psalms day after day.

I found that, even if it took a while—some prayer services I practically slept through, others I seemed to be observing from the planet Mars—the poetry of the psalms would break through and touch me. I became aware of three paradoxes in the psalms: that in them pain is indeed “missed—in Praise,” but in a way that takes pain fully into account; that though of all the books of the Bible the psalms speak most directly to the individual, they cannot be removed from a communal context; and that the psalms are