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By Root 799 0

holistic in insisting that the mundane and the holy are inextricably linked. The Benedictine method of reading psalms, with long silences between them rather than commentary or explanation, takes full advantage of these paradoxes, offering almost alarming room for interpretation and response. It allows the psalms their full poetic power, their use of imagery and hyperbole (“Awake, my soul, / awake lyre and harp, / I will awake the dawn” [Ps. 57:8]), repetition and contradiction, as tools of word-play as well as the play of human emotions. For all of their discipline, the Benedictines allowed me to relax and sing again in church; they allowed me, as one older sister, a widow with ten children, described it, to “let the words of the psalms wash over me, and experience the joy of just being with words.” As a poet I like to be with words. It was a revelation to me that this could be prayer; that this could be enough.

But to the modern reader the psalms can seem impenetrable: how in the world can we read, let alone pray, these angry and often violent poems from an ancient warrior culture? At a glance they seem overwhelmingly patriarchal, ill-tempered, moralistic, vengeful, and often seem to reflect precisely what is wrong with our world. And that’s the point, or part of it. As one reads the psalms every day, it becomes clear that the world they depict is not really so different from our own; the fourth-century monk Athanasius wrote that the psalms “become like a mirror to the person singing them,” and this is as true now as when he wrote it. The psalms remind us that the way we judge each other, with harsh words and acts of vengeance, constitutes injustice, and they remind us that it is the powerless in society who are overwhelmed when injustice becomes institutionalized. Psalm 35, like many psalms, laments God’s absence in our unjust world, even to the point of crying, “How long, O Lord, will you look on?” (v. 17). I take an odd comfort in recognizing that the ending of Psalm 12 is as relevant now as when it was written thousands of years ago: “Protect us forever from this generation / [for] . . . the worthless are praised to the skies” (vv. 7-8).

But this is not comfortable reading, and it goes against the American grain. A writer, whose name I have forgotten, once said that the true religions of America are optimism and denial. The psalms demand that we recognize that praise does not spring from a delusion that things are better than they are, but rather from the human capacity for joy. Only when we see this can we understand that both lamentation (“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord” [Ps. 130:1]) and exultation (“Cry with joy to the Lord, all the earth” [Ps. 100:1]) can be forms of praise. In our skeptical age, which favors appraisal over praise, the psalms are evidence that praise need not be a fruit of optimism. But Benedictine communities draw their members from the world around them and naturally reflect its values to some extent. Women in American society are conditioned to deny their pain, and to smooth over or ignore the effects of violence, even when it is directed against them. As one sister said to me, “Women seem to have trouble drawing the line between what is passive acceptance of suffering and what can transform it.” This is the danger that lies hidden in Emily Dickinson’s insight that “Pain—is missed—in Praise”: that we will try to jump too quickly from one to the other, omitting the necessary but treacherous journey in between, sentimentalizing both pain and praise in the process.

The sister, speaking of the women she counsels—displaced homemakers, abused wives, women returning to college after years away—says, “It doesn’t help that the church has such a lousy track record here. We’ve said all these crappy things to people, especially to women: ‘Offer it up,’ or ‘Suffering will make you strong.’ Jesus doesn’t say these things. He says, ‘This will cost you.’ ”

Anger is one honest reaction to the cost of pain, and the psalms are full of anger. Psalm 39 begins with a confident assertion of self-control: