The Psalms
They school us in honest prayer
The Church especially prays the psalms as it says the Daily Office. Day after day we join in the prayer of Jesus, are invited to truth and honesty, and brought more and more into the life of God.
What God wants us to pray
If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray.- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible
You become like what you worship
In part, this will happen simply because people who pray the Psalms will be worshiping the God who made them, and one of the basic spiritual laws is that you become like what you worship. More particularly, however, it will happen because people who pray the Psalms will be learning (whether they necessarily think it out like this or not) to live in God’s time as well as in their own, in God’s space as well as in their own, and even in and as God’s “matter”—the stuff of which we’re made—as well as in and as our own. - N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential
They school us in honest prayer
Praying the psalms from a Christological axis opens wide horizons. Because we are enmeshed in the context of the praying church, we realize as we recite the psalms that we are engaging in
prayer precisely as Christ’s body. There is another voice we can hear as we pray the psalms. This resolves the dilemma of purely subjective mood: While I may not be feeling joyful today, someone else in the body of Christ is. I therefore join my prayer to that member’s joy. Indeed, through the psalms I can offer the prayer some prisoner, hostage, or other endangered or despised person cannot pray; I pray out their lament, grief, or questioning. With Christ at the center, I can pray the psalms of innocence in him. In times of political or social turmoil, psalms that fulminate against “the lying lips . . . which speak against the righteous, haughtily, disdainfully, and with contempt” (Ps. 31:18) may provide just the words we need—or someone else may need—to pray our outrage at the injustice of a “post-truth” society. Most disturbing of all, of course, are the imprecatory or curse psalms. We cannot pray these with malicious intent, and the lectionary has made some of the most offensive verses optional. Yet even these psalms can work for our benefit. They reveal us to ourselves: they exhibit our most hateful thoughts and sinister motives, which we usually keep under wraps. One way or another Scripture tells the truth. Here it holds a mirror up to us, unmasking the ugly side of human nature. We pray the imprecatory psalms with humility, convicted of sin personally and as a species. Finally, because the psalms articulate an extensive range of human emotions—joy and sorrow, grief and indignation, praise and wonder—they school us in honest prayer. We do not have to hold anything back from God: what cannot be blessed needs to come under judgment. Without repeated exposure to God in prayer, our thoughts and feelings remain hidden, perhaps even from ourselves, and unsanctified. – Julia Gatta. Life in Christ
The prayer of Jesus Christ
The Psalter is the prayer book of Jesus Christ in the truest sense of the word. He prayed the Psalter and now it has become his prayer for all time...we understand how the Psalter can be prayer to God and yet God's own Word, precisely because here we encounter the praying Christ...because those who pray the psalms are joining in with the prayer of Jesus Christ, their prayer reaches the ears of God. Christ has become their intercessor. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
The mystery of the Psalms
For God has willed to make Himself known to us in the mystery of the Psalms. -Thomas Merton, Praying the Psalms
An inner attitude of humility and surrender
As to specific disciplines of prayer, these desert pioneers worked mostly with the psalms, and with such an intensity of commitment that later monastic tradition remembers them as having chanted the entire psalter—all 150 psalms—as a daily practice! While this may be a bit of an exaggeration, it is clear that the psalms were the mainstay of the desert devotional life. And that this chanting was supposed to be an intentional practice, not merely a mindless recitation, is clear from a number of reminders scattered throughout the desert writings such as the following: “It is a great thing to pray without distraction, but to chant psalms without distraction is even greater.” From clues such as these we can characterize the basic spiritual training of the desert as foundational work in the practice of attention based on the chanting of the psalms, undergirded by an inner attitude of humility and surrender that could be counted on to come to one’s assistance when all else failed.
- Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering prayer and inner awakening
Made for goodness
We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.” Desmond Tutu on Psalm 144:1-2
Blessed be the LORD my rock! *
who trains my hands to fight and my fingers to battle;
My help and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, *
my shield in whom I trust, who subdues the peoples under me
Illuminate and inform our own experiences
Thus, the process of reading, hearing, and becoming familiar with scripture is located in the Daily Office with a special emphasis on the psalms. In Morning and Evening Prayer, the psalms—the garden from which the fruit of all the other scriptures may be plucked, as Athanasius put it—would be repeated regularly (weekly, monthly, or following the prayer book's seven-week cycle), and the bulk of scripture read through every year or two depending on how many lessons were used at Evening Prayer. This is fundamentally catechetical—it teaches. This pattern grounds us in the stories, the laws, the histories, and the laments of the people of God that illuminate and inform our own experiences. - Derek Olsen, Inwardly Digest: The Prayer Book as Guide to a Spiritual Life
A slight protection against such self-deception
C. S. Lewis knew that we are inclined to twist things to serve our self-oriented inclinations. He wrote, “What we see when we think we are looking into the depths of scripture may sometimes be only a reflection of our own silly faces.” The Psalms offer a slight protection against such self-deception. We get to offer praise even when we least feel like it. We may join in language of anger and judgment and find ourselves wanting to run away from being that person. The Psalms draw us into the whole range of human experience and feeling. We are taken into the complex and full experience of humanity’s relationship with God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wanted us to start with the assumption that the Psalms “have to do with Jesus Christ,” that we need to understand them as God’s Word. Such a starting place would allow us to pray the Psalms with Jesus Christ to the Father. He wrote, “It does not depend, therefore, on whether the Psalms express adequately that which we feel at any given moment in our heart. If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray.” - Michelle Heyne and Robert Gallagher, Finding God in All Things: Contemplation, Intercession, and Intervention
They raised a fist to God
The psalms are the journey songs of the people who made that passage. Time and again they raised a fist to God and shouted angrily at him, asking him where his will was in their lives. Had he forgotten or betrayed his faithful people? If we try to sanitize, edit, or sentimentalize the psalms, they lose their power. They are the songs of a people who were moving away from a known situation into the unknown, and they were often angry with a God who removed all those certainties, who instead seemed to be leading them along an apparently precarious path. They did not sit down for long beside gently flowing streams or linger in lush meadows. When we pray the psalms as they did, we, too, are compelled to stay "at the raw edge," in the words of Walter Brueggemann. – Esther deWaal, To Pause on the Threshold
Adoring delight in the splendour of God
Yet it is mainly by means of the Psalms that both the historic and spiritual continuity of Christian corporate worship has been secured; and in them we have an inexhaustible storehouse of devotional material and a means of common prayer and adoration which is accepted as it stands by Christians of every type. Thus in opening the Psalter we open a door which admits us as no other can to the worship of the Universal Church; her penitence, her supplication, her invulnerable confidence, her adoring delight in the splendour of God. Here Catholic and Covenanter sing from one service book, and acknowledge themselves to be brothers under their skins. In due course the Psalter became the core of the Divine Office; and by this very circumstance has fed and coloured the worship of all the generations of the saints. – Evelyn Underhill, Worship
Pay attention to the volume, pace, and focus of one’s own voice
The pause at the asterisk gets them every time. Never mind the printed instruction in the daily office book or even the verbal warning before the office begins, invariably newcomers to Morning or Evening Prayer will feel the embarrassing warmth of the spotlight as theirs is the only voices still reading the psalm after the asterisk, when the rest of the congregation has paused. To be sure, there is no judgment among the veterans. We’ve all blown past the asterisk.
In his letter to Marcellinus, St. Athanasius wrote that the psalms “become like a mirror to the person singing them, so that he might perceive himself and the motions of his soul, and thus affected, he might receive them.” In nearly 10 years of praying the Office in community, I have found that the psalter, in addition to being a mirror to the person, is also a microcosm of the parish. Athanasius was speaking of primarily of what was said in the psalms, I’m speaking primarily of how it’s said. ….
The greatest lessons I’ve learned concerning leadership have not come from a corporate office, but from the Office said corporately. The best strategy in leading a parish, or anything, is to remain diligent in one’s own prayers and to pay attention to the volume, pace, and focus of one’s own voice. The greatest tactic in growing the parish is to teach them how to pray.
The pause at the asterisk will get them every time. It will get them in the church. It will get them in the prayer book. It will get them closer to Jesus Christ. - Steve Rice, Wait for It: Praying the Psalms in Community – Covenant, The Living Church
God actually initiates this game
Many of the psalms express our universal thirst for God: “As the deer longs for the water-brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God” (Ps. 42:1). Psalm 27 speaks in another vivid metaphor about seeking God’s “face.” But here the psalmist goes further, pressing his own seeking back to its source. He attributes his pursuit of God to God’s pursuit of him: “You speak in my heart and say, ‘Seek my face.’” So here is a surprise: it is ultimately God’s desire for us that animates our desire for God. The psalmist finds his heart resonating with the word God speaks within it, calling him forward. His search for the face of God is but a response to God’s word already sounding in the depths of his being. Naturally, we start with our own feelings. We are most cognizant of our own longings, including our longing for God. Yet in time we may sense, as does the psalmist, that God actually initiates this game of seeking and finding. Or as the First Epistle of John puts it, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). - Julia Gatta, Life in Christ
Made David dance
The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance. - C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
Face my inner conflicts
The psalms allow me to face my inner conflicts. They allow me to shake my fist at God one moment, and the next to break out into spontaneous song. I am angry, but then I am grateful. I complain at the bitterness of my lot, and then I rejoice at the untold blessings which I receive. If I discover the fullness of my own humanity I also discover the many faces of God. If the story of the people of Israel and their struggle in holding on to the covenant is also my own story, the psalms leave me in no doubt, as to the difficulties involved in that relationship. That in itself is consoling. For here is a people who experience struggle and sacrifice, who know the light and the dark, hunger and thirst, who grumble and complain, and who rejoice and praise - and who have no inhibitions in doing complain, and who rejoice and praise - and who have no inhibitions in doing this completely openly and vigorously. – Esther deWaal, Living with Contradictions