Investigating the Psalms

The psalms are weighing on me after two days with the Liturgy of the Hours. I am testament to their lure, yet their language often eludes me. All the prostrating to “Lord,” hating adversaries and accusations of sin deter me. All the references to Israel and Zion confound me with their seeming lack of relevance in my life. Oh, that out of Zion would come the salvation of Israel! (53:7) These are words and ideas from another time, another culture, another political reality than mine.

But I won’t give up. I tried and tried to read William Faulkner to no avail until my brother said, “Don’t read his writing word for word but let the words wash over you.” And with that advice I plowed through four or five Faulkner novels one winter, finding the stories alive and searing in my living room. I feel the same possibility for the literature of the psalms.

Kathleen Norris suggests, “The psalms make us uncomfortable because they don’t allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation in praise.” But still I question basing daily—hourly, prayer on so much pain and judgment. What we put into ourselves, our sustenance, matters. Television, junk food, the fixation on tragedy in the nightly news, these affect our chemical and psychological (and spiritual) makeup. I’m not advocating denial of anger or pain at all, but just wondering how these particular writings might or might not benefit us today.

And yet if I change the word Lord to Love, the power of this poetry grips me and won’t let me go:

O, [Love] to you I call; hasten to me;

hearken to my voice when I call upon you.

Let my prayer come like incense before you;

the lifting up of my hands, like the evening sacrifice.

Should semantics matter?