Praying the Psalms

http://prayingdaily.blogspot.com/2007/02/we-met-last-thursday-at-first-united.html

 

Many Christians go to the Psalms to find one or more that express his or her particular feelings and thoughts at the moment or for the occasion. Bibles often list such "appropriate" psalms or psalm verses as follows:

· When you want to praise God : Psalm 92:1,2, Psalm 100, Psalm 150
· When times are hard : Psalm 138:7,8, Psalm 94:17-19, Psalm 18:1,2
· When your integrity is tested : Ps.1:1-3, Ps.119:9,11,104,105, Ps.25:10,21
· When you want God's protection : Psalm 27:4-8, Psalm 91:1-16 )
· When you are tempted to hit back : Psalm 37:7-9
· When you want God's guidance : Psalm 32:8, Psalm 27:1,14
· When you need to be reminded of your dependence on God : Psalm 105:3,4

Such an approach to the psalms may be described as "individual-centric"; that is, a person chooses a psalm to fit his own personal experience. There is nothing wrong with this approach; however, it is not the approach we use with the Daily Office.

When praying all the psalms, one after another, we necessarily find ourselves praying without regard to our personal circumstances or feelings at any particular moment. When entering a lamentation, for example, initially we may not feel a personal need to lament. Indeed, life might well be going along rather nicely. When praying the psalms in the Daily Office, we therefore leave a good bit of ourselves behind and forget, for a time, our personal idiosyncratic feelings for a space and time larger than ourselves. We enter what may be described as variously as "prayer of God," the intercessory prayers of our High Priest, the prayers of His Body, the Church, and the prayers of all people throughout the world. When entering the Psalms we open ourselves to the Lord Jesus praying before His Father within us (Hebrews 4.14-5.10), we allow others in the Body of Christ to use our voices, and we open ourselves to the articulations of a suffering world. Listening to the Spirit crying "Abba" within us, we cry and pray with the Paraclete, everyone's Advocate before the Father. When praying the psalms we prioritize our corporate identity with the world, the Church, and the Holy Trinity so that words, thoughts, feelings, concerns, and passions (not originally our own) become our own in prayer. We become the articulation of God and the voices of the voiceless, the poor and suffering whom God loves and wishes to save and for whom he desires justice.

This way of praying the Psalms accords, confirms, and reinforces the way our Jewish and Christian ancestors approached "the prayer book of the Bible." They memorized and sang the psalms as pilgrims to festivals; they sang the psalms with musical accompaniment in temple worship; they memorized and chanted the psalms in family settings; Jesus knew them by heart, and while walking muttered them (as Psalm 1 recommends) and while teaching referred to them over and again (e.g., Luke 20), and while dying cried them out in anguish. When clarifying recent events on the way to Emmaus, he opened the psalms to his disciples so that they could see the will and way of His serving Lordship (Luke 24). Our Lord prayed and lived out the Psalms. With Him, so do we.


Praying the psalms is for us God's way of changing our lives so that, no longer preoccupied with our personal needs (important as they are) we see, hear, and speak the world from God's point of view, from within the "mind of Christ" (Philippians 2), so that in the psalms we become more human, more like Christ.

SELECT BIBLIGRAPHY

Athanasius, "Praying the Psalms," A Letter to Marcellinus, in On the Incarnation. Translated and edited by A Religious of C.S.M.V. New York: Macmillan, 1946.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Meditations on the Psalms. Translated and edited by Edwin Robertson. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002.

---. Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg P, 1970.

Brueggemann, Walter. The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg P, 1984.

---. Spirituality of the Psalms. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress P, 2002.

Lewis, C. S. Reflections on the Psalms

Pius Parsch, "Praying the Psalms," from Der Wochenpsalter des Römischen Breviers, available at http://www.breviary.net/comment/commentpraypsa.htm

Reardon, Patrick Henry. Christ in the Psalms. Ben Lomond, CA: Conciliar P, 2000).