Editor’s note: This article was first published in the Aug. 2, 1997, issue of America, titled "Praying the Psalms: Some Notes.”
For some years I have been keeping rather extensive reading notebooks. The following reflections on the psalms are culled from those notes, I hope they will encourage others to share their own reflections on encountering the word of God.
It has been my custom early each morning to read some of those psalms stipulated for the day in the Liturgy of the Hours. It would be a bit grandiose to say that this exercise of mine derives from intense piety, since my usual impulse in doing this is the rather self-serving desire to be “quiet” or “focused” for a few minutes before the craziness of the academic day begins. One inflexible rule: no peeking at The New York Times before reading from the Psalter. Another rule, badly observed: Write out in my journal any striking word or line I run across in my reading. I perform this latter discipline in obedience to something W. H. Auden once wrote about poetry. He said poets do not write because they have important things to say but because they love “hanging around words listening to what they have to say.” What better language for a theologian to listen to than the language of the psalms?
St. Thomas Aquinas says that all of the works of God recorded in the Old Testament and everything that pertains to Christ in the New Testament are contained in the Psalter in the form of praise (per modum laudis). Thomas repeats, in that observation, a millennial commonplace, since the psalms were the first thing ancient Christians learned as part of their elementary education. Those ancient poems contained doctrine under the rubric of prayer. It was expected, in the ancient monastic world, that every monk would memorize the Psalter. The ancient Irish monastic rules spoke often of the Na tri coiciat, the “three fifties”—that is, the Psalter, with its 150 psalms. St. Jerome, writing to Paula about the education of her daughter, tells her to begin with the Psalter. The tradition is full of stuff like that.
The psalms make tremendous sense when sung in a monastic setting. There is something extraordinarily right about singing in a darkening church at Compline, as the great silence envelops the cloister: “In peace I will both lie down and sleep/ for Thou alone, O Lord, make me to dwell in safety” (Ps. 4:8). Similarly, one gets an insight into why monks get up in the early morning while it is still dark. The psalms they sing underscore the office of vigils: watchers who wait for the dawn and for the coming of the Lord. “My soul waits for the Lord/ more than watchmen for the morning/ more than watchmen for the morning/ O Israel, wait for the Lord!” (Ps. 130:6-7). I do not want to overly romanticize a monastic setting, because Thomas Merton once said that he really learned the beauty of the psalms when he said them under the pine trees free from the “artifice’” of a monastic choir.
One could make an anthology of just a few verses chosen here and there and have a complete prayer book. Most of us do not have the opportunity to sing the psalms in such a wonderful setting as a monastic church. Nor can we always identify with the psalmist’s geographical sense. The “ascent” psalms are perfect when recited as one leaves Tel Aviv to “go up” to Jerusalem, but they are only a literary conceit when recited in the flatlands of Indiana. Similarly, I know Tarshish and Bashan only by looking them up in a Bible atlas and must rely on my impoverished imagination to visualize the “dragons of the deep” and the “crushed leviathan” of Psalm 74.
To enter the world of the psalms is, in short, to enter the world of the other, an other who has had profound experiences of God with which I can frequently resonate. The psalmist sometimes depicts God as distant, majestic, worthy of adoration from afar. That same God, in the same psalm, can quickly then show himself as close, intimate and caring. It is as if a camera is moving from a long, panoramic shot to a closeup. In Psalm 9, for example, God is depicted as “enthroned forever,” but that cosmic sense of God enthroned (over the cosmos, over the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple) quickly shifts in verse nine to a God who is “Lord of the oppressed.” That shift from distant majesty to concerned immediacy recurs continually within individual psalms. Distance and intimacy are markers of the deepest spirituality and the full sensibility of the psalmist.
The Psalter, in its predilection for the majesty of God and his cosmic rule in his enthronement, often shows God and his majesty in the epiphanies of thunderstorms or in temple theophanies; but quickly the psalmist turns to earthy, immediate details to speak of that same God. Longing to dwell in the temple of the Lord is like the sparrow finding a home or the swallow finding a nest for herself (Ps. 84:3). Did the audience remember that line when Jesus, poignantly, said that the “birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head” (Mt. 8:20)?
The mention of Jesus reminds me that the Christian warrant for praying the psalms is not only so that we can rummage around to find prophetic allusions to the coming Messiah, even though there is plainly a messianic thread in the Psalter. We also pray the psalms because Jesus prayed them. We pray in solidarity with him and with the Chosen People. We pray the psalms because Jesus died with a psalm on his lips.
That solidarity with the praying Jesus began to sink in the more I thought of Jesus praying the psalms in the synagogues of Palestine. Could Jesus, for instance, have spoken of the pure of heart in the Beatitudes if he had not, in David’s words, confessed what was needed to ascend the path to Mount Zion: “He who has clean hands and a pure heart” (Ps. 24:3)? Purity of heart is at the heart of biblical spirituality; it is the necessary precondition for those who “seek the face of the God of Jacob” (Ps. 24:6).
One can read through most of the Psalter each month by following the order of the Liturgy of the Hours; in a year one would go through the Psalter at least a dozen times. Does this routine grow stale after a bit? If we race through the words unblinkingly, it probably could. The great spiritual guides, however, argue for a slower, more ruminative approach to the Bible in general and to the psalms in particular. St. John Cassian (ca. 365-435), who recorded the ascetical tradition of the Egyptian desert, wrote in his Conferences that the opening plea of Psalm 70 (“O God, come to my assistance/ O Lord, make haste to help me”) would suffice as a perpetual and continual prayer for a monk. It did not become the constant prayer of the monk in the West, but it is a verse that opens every recitation of the Divine Office to this day. One could make an anthology of just a few verses chosen here and there and have a complete prayer book; verses like “Our help is in the name of the Lord,/ who made heaven and earth” (Ps. 124:8). That prayer should keep one going for a week or so. I also like the line in Psalm 40:6 where we thank God for “an open ear”; scholars say the Hebrew means literally “ears God has dug for us.”
Once I read through the whole Psalter and made a list of every name given to God. Besides the usual titles of king, judge and shepherd, there were these very strong images of God as fortress ("A mighty fortress is our God” Luther would write; he knew his Psalter), rock, stronghold. It was only after a few visits to Israel that it struck me that God is a rock, fortress, stronghold in the way that Jerusalem was the same; that these were visual metaphors that would occur almost naturally to people. I guess this insight came to me slowly since there are no fortresses on hilltops or even rocks to speak of in my native Florida. Likewise the “cool waters” or the “verdant pastures” would be reassuring signs of wonder for people living in an arid land: but, I often think, what would a person in the Arctic think of them (to say nothing of sheep)?
I got this idea of reading the Psalter all the way through looking for certain descriptive words or usages because I read somewhere that every time he would start a new book, the late Yves Congar, O.P., would read the entire Bible through from Genesis to Revelation (Jacques Ellul did the same thing) and write out every verse that pertained to his topic. I am abashed at the thought of such industry, but doing the Psalter in this fashion is instructive.
The great scholars of the psalms, like H. Gunkel and S. Mowinckel, have constructed classifications of the psalms (psalms of lament, wisdom psalms, songs of ascent, enthronement psalms, etc.). Sometimes I would read psalms in only those categories; but I now prefer, at times, just to start with the first psalm and read right through.
Of course not all of the Psalter is sung in the liturgy of the church. Psalms 58, 83 and 109 are omitted from the monthly cycle of psalms since the sentiments are, not to put too fine a point on it, harsh. Psalm 109 is about as vindictive a piece of work as one is likely to read; David prays that the children of his enemy be fatherless, his wife a widow and so on until he shifts gears to praise God and create a litany of his own woes. Psalm 58 earnestly prays that the evildoer have his teeth smashed, since they are like snails that dissolve into slime. Of course, it is not clear that God answers these precise prayers, but he is a very tough sovereign in the psalms. Sebastian Moore, O.S.B.. once wrote that God does things in the Psalter that systematic theologians would never permit!
It is instructive to skim through the old King James Version of the Bible. One sees odd phrases that arrest the attention. The other day I puzzled over the psalmist’s request that God “put my tears into your bottle” (Ps. 56:8) and loved the observation that the wicked person is like a “deaf cobra that stops its ears”’ (Ps. 58:4), which is weakened, in modern versions, to “adder” or “viper,” losing the image, for me, of the snake charmer.
To appreciate the Psalter deeply one must do two things that are seemingly contradictory: Read the text whole while pausing to savor its particularity. I like very much the lovely metaphor used by Patricia Hampl in her wonderful book Virgin Time. She describes the nuns who taught her in high school at prayer, “trolling hour and season back and forth over the fathomless pools of the psalms.” The metaphor is apt, as any fisherman knows. One trolls endlessly over the waters not to get somewhere but to experience that moment when there is an eruptive strike. Hence, morning after morning I read my psalms, and every now and again a phrase or a word erupts in my consciousness turning routine into insight.
Just a few weeks ago, I read the very familiar Psalm 139 about the God who knows when I sit down and when I rise up. For the first time I seem to have really read the line “Even before a word is on my tongue/ lo, Lord, you know it altogether” (139:4). That verse acted as a brake for my mind. Somehow I began to think about what the psalmist adds: that God follows me to heaven, descends with me to Sheol: that my darkness is light to God: that my very making was known to God. (There are some powerful pro-life sentiments implicit in verses 13 to 16). A careful reading of that psalm gave me a new angle from which to think about the sustaining power of God. It was, as it were, a verbal icon of those powerful depictions of the Pantocrator (the One who holds all things in his hands) depicted in the apses of Byzantine churches.
To gain these insights one trolls, but one also stops. The great spiritual writers often use images of nutrition: eating, savoring, chewing, digesting, ruminating upon the words of the Bible. They are not afraid to use the parallel of the Eucharist: What we consume becomes part of us. St. Bernard of Clairvaux extends this image in a comment not designed to please the fastidious contemporary sensibility. Commenting on a verse from the Vulgate Psalter, cor meum eructavit verbum bonum, Bernard notes that the verb eructare means “to belch.” The last of the Western Fathers says that when we are sated on the Scriptures our heart (cor meum) is able to belch forth a good word (verbum bonum) like one who is satisfied with a good meal.
It is not easy, in these media-saturated days, to read with the reflective slowness that permits the sacred text to speak back to us. Indeed, if we are concerned about reading the Bible reflectively and the Psalter contemplatively there are any number of modern habits that we need to unlearn. The problem with television is that we cannot lift our eye from the screen without losing something. The problem with the computer screen is nearly the same: We cannot underline easily; but, more crucially, we cannot pick up the monitor, walk around, set it down, pick it up and walk some more. In other words, these devices (I use them both) are not tactile. To read prayerfully we must eschew speed and efficiency. We must not “process words” (an ugly phrase, in any event); we must not speed read; we must value slowness.
There is something wonderful about a beaten-up, heavily marked, tattered Bible. Madeline Delbrel, the French Catholic activist who lived a little more than a generation ago, stuffed her Bible with snapshots, clippings, ticket stubs, postcards and other detritus to remind her that she was praying in the world of people and events. She called these scraps “icons of humanity” that prompted one to celebrate the “liturgy of life.”
The contemplative recitation of the psalms (or even one psalm) is an antidote to hurry. If we read slowly with a view to savor and digest, we can only do so with the prior conviction (known as faith) that these words count, that they reveal, that they speak back to us.
The tradition insists that the psalms do speak back to us. Athanasius in his Letter to Marcellinus says that “these words [of the psalms] become like a mirror singing them, so that the reader might perceive himself and the emotions of his soul.”
Possible contemplative strategies:
1) Pick out one psalm and say it slowly every day, morning and night, for a month.
2) Compose a litany of different psalm verses and use them as a prayer for a long time.
3) Write some psalm paraphrases (I would be in good company; John Milton did some terrific paraphrases).
4) Pick out a number (how many?) of wonderful words like mercy and meditate on them.
5) Read the Psalter in company with a classic commentary like Augustine’s Enarrationes.
6) Relearn, gulp, Hebrew!
What Paul Celan said of poems is all the more true of the psalms; They are gifts given to the attentive.
