The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [45]
The communal recitation of the psalms works against this form of narcissism, the tendency in America to insist that everything be self-discovery. One soon finds that a strength of the monastic choir is that it always contains someone ready to lament over a lifetime of days of “emptiness and pain” (Ps. 70:10) or to shout with a joy loud enough to make “the rivers clap their hands” (Ps. 98:8). Though, as one sister says, “we’re so different I sometimes think we live in different universes, the liturgy brings us back to what’s in the heart. And the psalms are always instructing the heart.” This is not a facile remark. The vow of “conversion of life,” which is unique to Benedictines, means that you commit yourself to being changed by the words of the psalms, allowing them to work on you, and sometimes to work you over.
A cursing psalm such as 52: “You love lies more than truth . . . you love the destructive word” (v. 3) might occasion self-recrimination, demanding that we pray it for someone who is angry with us, and also reflect on just how justified that person might be in leveling such an accusation against us. Psalm 22, which moves dramatically from pain (“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”[v. 1]) to prophetic praise (“All the earth shall remember and return to the Lord . . .” [v. 27]), might pose a challenge to the rational mind. What if there is no one to hear such a prayer? What if one is simply too exhausted by despair to pray it? Herein lies the gift of communal worship. “In the really hard times,” says one sister, “when it’s all I can do to keep breathing, it’s still important for me to go to choir. I feel as if the others are keeping my faith for me, pulling me along.”
It helps that the psalms themselves keep moving. In a monastic choir they inevitably pull a person out of private prayer, into community and then into the world, into what might be termed praying the news. Psalm 74’s lament on the violation of sacred space: “Every cave in the land is a place where violence has made its home” (v. 20) has become for me a prayer for the victims and perpetrators of domestic violence. Watching television footage of the Los Angeles riots of early 1992 gave me a new context for the words of Psalm 55 that I encountered the next morning in the monastic choir: “I see nothing but violence and strife in the city” (v. 9). Hearing Psalm 79 (“They have poured out water like blood in Jerusalem / there is no one left to bury the dead” [v. 3]) as I read of civil war in the Balkans forces me to reflect on the evil that tribalism and violence, often justified by religion, continue to inflict on our world.
But the relentless realism of the psalms is not depressing in the way that television news can be, although many of the same events are reported: massacres, injustices to those who have no one to defend them, people tried in public by malicious tongues. As a book of praises, meant to be sung, the Psalter contains a hope that “human interest” stories tacked on to the end of a news broadcast cannot provide. The psalms mirror our world but do not allow us to become voyeurs. In a nation unwilling to look at its own violence, they force us to recognize our part in it. They make us re-examine our values.
When we want to “feel good about ourselves” (which I have heard seriously proposed as the purpose of worship), when we’ve gone to the trouble to “get a life,” current slang suggesting that life itself is a commodity, how can we say, with the psalmist, “I am poor and needy” (Ps. 40:17) or “my life is but a breath” (Ps. 39:5)? It seems so damned negative, even if it’s true. How can we read Psalm 137, one of the most troubling of the psalms and also one of the most beautiful? The ultimate song of exile, it begins: “By the waters of Babylon / there we sat and wept, / remembering Zion.”
In a line that expresses the bitterness of colonized people everywhere, the psalmist continues:
For it was there that they asked us,
our captors, for songs,
our oppressors, for joy.
“Sing to us,” they said,
“one of Zion’s songs.”