The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [42]
Many Benedictine women find that the psalms provide an outlet for such anger; the psalms don’t theologize or explain anger away. One reason for this is that the psalms are poetry, and poetry’s function is not to explain but to offer images and stories that resonate with our lives. Walter Brueggemann, a Lutheran theologian, writes in Israel’s Praise that in the psalms pain acts both as “the locus of possibility” and “the matrix of praise.” This is a dangerous insight, as risky as Dickinson’s. There’s a fine line between idealizing or idolizing pain, and confronting it with hope. But I believe that both writers are speaking the truth about the psalms. The value of this great songbook of the Bible lies not in the fact that singing praise can alleviate pain but that the painful images we find there are essential for praise, that without them, praise is meaningless. It becomes the “dreadful cheer” that Minnesota author Carol Bly has complained of in generic American Christianity, which blinds itself to pain and thereby makes a falsehood of its praise.
People who rub up against the psalms every day come to see that while children may praise spontaneously, it can take a lifetime for adults to recover this ability. One sister told me that when she first entered the convent as an idealistic young woman, she had tried to pretend that “praise was enough.” It didn’t last long. The earthy honesty of the psalms had helped her, she says, to “get real, get past the holy talk and the romantic image of the nun.” In expressing all the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the psalms act as good psychologists. They defeat our tendency to try to be holy without being human first. Psalm 6 mirrors the way in which our grief and anger are inextricably mixed; the lament that “I am exhausted with my groaning; / every night I drench my pillow with tears” (v. 6) soon leads to rage: “I have grown old surrounded by my foes. / Leave me, you who do evil (vv. 7-8). Psalm 38 stands on the precipice of depression, as wave after wave of bitter self-accusation crashes against the small voice of hope. The psalm is clinically accurate in its portrayal of extreme melancholia: “the very light has gone from my eyes” (v. 10), “my pain is always before me” (v. 17), and its praise is found only in the possibility of hope: “It is for you, O Lord, that I wait” (v. 15). Psalm 88 is one of the few that ends without even this much praise. It takes us to the heart of pain and leaves us there, saying, “My one companion is darkness” (v. 18). We can only hope that this darkness is a friend, one who provides a place in which our deepest wounds can heal.
The psalms make us uncomfortable because they don’t allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation into praise. As a Benedictine sister in her fifties, having recently come through both the loss of a job and the disintegration of a long-term friendship, put it to me, “I feel as if God is rebuilding me, ‘binding up my wounds’ (Ps. 147:3). “But,” she adds, “I’m tired, and little pieces of the psalms are all I can handle. Once you’ve fallen apart, you take what nourishment you can. The psalms feel to me like a gentle spring rain: you hardly know that it’s sinking in, but something good happens.”
The psalms reveal our most difficult conflicts, and our deep desire, in Jungian terms, to run from the shadow. In them, the shadow speaks to us directly, in words that are painful to hear. In recent years, some