The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [44]
The daily praying of the psalms helps monastic people to live with them in a balanced and realistic way, appreciating their hyperbole without taking it as prescriptive. Benedictines become so close to the psalms that they become, as more than one sister told me, “like a heartbeat.” The psalms do become a part of a Benedictine’s physical as well as spiritual life, acting on the heart to slow it down, something I came to know as I often came to noon prayer with my mind still racing with the work I’d interrupted. Beginning to recite a psalm such as 62, which begins: “In God alone is my soul at rest,” I’d feel as if I were skidding to a halt. Like many of the psalms, it laments human falsity, those who “with their mouth . . . utter blessing / but in their heart they curse” (v. 4). But the next line: “In God alone be at rest, my soul,” offers not only a pleasurable poetic repetition but a shift from pain into hope, a widening of horizons that is not only sound but comforting.
But daily exposure to the psalms also makes it possible to become numb to them, to read even the most stunning poetry (“By God’s word the heavens were made, / by the breath of God’s mouth all the stars” [Ps. 33:6]) in such a way that you scarcely notice what you’ve said. But what often happens is that holiness reasserts itself so that even familiar psalms suddenly infuse the events of one’s life with new meaning. One sister told me that as she prayed the psalms aloud at the bedside of her dying mother, who was in a coma, she discovered “how perfectly the psalms reflected my own inner chaos: my fear of losing her, or of not losing her and seeing her suffer more, of saying goodbye, of being motherless.” She found that the closing lines of Psalm 16—“You will show me the path of life, / the fullness of joy in your presence”—consoled her “as I saw my mother slipping away. I was able to turn her life over to God.”
Internalizing the psalms in this way allows contemporary Benedictines to find personal relevance in this ancient poetry. Paradoxically it also frees them from the tyranny of individual experience. To say or sing the psalms aloud within a community is to recover religion as an oral tradition, restoring to our mouths words that have been snatched from our tongues and relegated to the page, words that have been privatized and effectively silenced. It counters our tendency to see individual experience as sufficient for formulating a vision of the world.
The liturgy that Benedictines have been experimenting with for fifteen-hundred-plus years taught me the value of tradition; I came to see that the psalms are holy in part because they are so well-used. If so many generations had found solace here, might I also? The holiness of the psalms came to seem like that of a stone that has been held in the palm by countless ancestors, illustrating the difference between what the poet Galway Kinnell has termed the “merely personal,” or individual, and the “truly personal,” which is individual experience reflected back into community and tradition. That great scholar of mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, makes the same distinction when speaking of prayer, admitting that “devotion by itself has little value . . . and may even be a form of self-indulgence,” unless it is accompanied by a transformation of the personal. “The spiritual life of individuals,” she writes, “has to be extended both vertically to God and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore the more truly personal it will be.”
Recent scholarship regards the psalms as liturgical poems that were used in ancient Israel’s communal worship. Even individual laments such as Psalm 51, it is believed, were incorporated into a public worship setting. But praying the psalms is often disconcerting for contemporary people who encounter Benedictine life: raised in a culture that idolizes individual experience, they find it difficult to recite a lament when they’re in a good mood, or to sing a hymn of praise when they’re