For a time when my eldest son was in his preteen years, we took up the habit of reading portions of Scripture together on Sunday. As you might imagine, this was my idea rather than his. Our general practice was to select a small portion of text and read it a few times, while also looking at the annotations in the footer connecting our passage to other verses or portions of Scripture. A good deal of our time was thus spent flipping through the Bible as we read “across the text,” learning to see how the word of God unfolds as one broad and full voice.
For Lent one year, we decided to read the last words of Jesus from the cross. We kept to our familiar practice of reading each passage, then looking to the annotations directing us to other portions of Scripture. As we did this, we found ourselves flipping continually to the Book of Psalms.
Jesus’ “I thirst” of John 19:28 led us to Psalm 69, where we read the direct connection in verse 2, as the psalmist laments, “They gave me gall for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” Reading around that psalm, we found the psalmist further expressing that “I am weary with crying; my throat is parched” (v. 3); “I am the talk of those who sit in the gate, and the drunkards make songs about me” (v. 12); and “Insults have broken my heart, so that I am in despair. I looked for pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none” (v. 20). Having read all this, I asked my son what he thought of Jesus’ thirst on the basis of this psalm. In the reading journal he was keeping, he wrote, “the one who is suffering wants mercy not too much wine, or any really.” Yes, Jesus’ throat was parched for water, but the psalm taught my son (and me!) that Jesus’ whole body and soul were thirsting for compassion.
We went through the other “last words” in similar fashion and consistently found ourselves back in the psalter. At some point I asked my son what he thought about all these lines from the psalms coming from Jesus’ lips on the cross. I expected him to say something like “Jesus was using the psalms to explain what was happening to him.” That is pretty much what I would have said. But my son said something that surprised me and, in fact, brought me into a deeper reflection on who the Lord is and what he does; my son said: “I think Jesus was probably praying the psalms the whole time he was on the cross.”
That is a profound insight, one that leads us to consider that the humility of the Son of God is made manifest in his emptying of himself into the words of the psalter, where the entire human condition is expressed. Those last words on the cross are like moments when we hear what he was doing always: taking on the whole human condition as his own.
By praying the psalms, the Church and each of her members can meet Christ Jesus, who “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil 2:6-7). His humility meets our joys and hopes, our griefs and anxieties — he takes it all on willingly.
The body of Christ
The Christian practice of praying the psalms is an act of assent to the mystery of the Incarnation. By all the various pathways that the psalms carve out for us, we move from every conceivable condition toward praise of God. These paths have not opened because of inventive techniques or magical incantations; rather, these are open wide because the Son of God descended from on high to all the nooks and crannies of our lowliness, only to return again from our lowliness, with our humanity, into glory at the right hand of the Father. The psalms indeed offer us a spirituality of the Incarnation, which is made complete in his (and eventually our) ascension: Christ toward us in mercy, us following Christ to glory. His works are the possibility of our union with God.
In his exposition on Psalm 85, St. Augustine announces the leitmotif of “the whole Christ,” which establishes the deepest mystery and most wondrous exchange present in the entirety of the psalter: “God could have granted no greater gift to human beings than to cause his Word, through whom he created all things, to be their head, and to fit them to him as his members. He was thus to be both Son of God and Son of Man, one God with the Father, one human being with us. The consequence is that when we speak to God in prayer we do not separate the Son from God and when the body of the Son prays it does not separate its head from itself. The one sole savior of his body is our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who prays for us, prays in us, and is prayed to by us. He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our head, and he is prayed to by us as our God. Accordingly, we must recognize our voices in him, and his accents in ourselves.”
The entire field of Christian prayer is filled with the presence of Christ; there is no Christian prayer that stretches beyond the bounds of his love and mercy. For the needs and prayers that we do not, cannot or will not offer for ourselves or for each other, Christ offers them for us as our priest. For the needs and prayers that we do happen to offer, he joins us in voicing them — or rather, we join him as we offer our voices in prayer — and he prays in us, for we are members of him. And in union with the Father, he receives our prayers, listening graciously and attentively, so that he is prayed to by us, since he is now what he always has been: truly God.
The practice of praying the psalms is, for the Church and her members, an act of obedience to the love of Christ. We practice approaching God with who and what we truly are. We speak our needs, directly. We acknowledge our faults, clearly. We offer our praise, fully. We seek in trust, earnestly. As the theologian Father Romano Guardini wrote in his book “Wisdom of the Psalms,” “The psalms become meaningful for us, because as we pray them we are revealed to ourselves. We take as our own the words which we find there. We learn to see our heart not as we wish it to be but as it really is; not only as we are familiar with but also its hidden and dark paths. And we bring this all before God.” In other words, we offer to God the real and messy humanity that the Son of God deemed worthy to take on as his own.
My own but not my own
A peculiar thing happens when the faithful pray the psalms: We often speak in the first person voice — “I” or even “we” — when the condition we are thereby expressing is not presently our own. As the theologian Catherine Petrany writes, “When one speaks the ‘I’ of Psalm 8 along with the ‘I’ of Psalm 88, one articulates attitudes and perspectives that one might not otherwise recognize within themselves.”
It would be difficult to find two psalms more different than these two, as Psalm 8 is an evocation of wonder as the psalmist gazes upon the marvels of the cosmos, while Psalm 88 is a dark and desperate lament. And yet, when the same person, in obedience to the psalter — these prayers given rather than chosen — prays both Psalm 8 and Psalm 88, “The awestruck stargazer who prays Psalm 88 is compelled into the role of desolate supplicant; the isolated sufferer who hymns Psalm 8 is obliged to marvel at divine creation.” Moreover, Petrany continues, “The sinner teaches the righteous path when she speaks Psalm 1, and the righteous one begs for forgiveness when he repents in Psalm 51.”
To inhabit a condition not properly your own as if it were your own is a move patterned in Christ himself. He who was not a sinner went down into the waters of the Jordan with all the sinners as if he were one of them. He who was full of glory was stripped as if he were a criminal. He who was one with God was scorned and put to death as if God had forsaken him. The psalms teach us how to move like Christ: to take on conditions not our own as if they were our own, to speak an “I” when we would not do so on our own. What is not at this moment my own becomes my own, as I am plunged more deeply into the truth of the human condition, and even as I discover truths about myself that I otherwise would have neglected.
If the scourge of sin is the privileging of oneself over and above all others, then the humility of this kind of prayer is tonic to our wounded souls. By learning to do the very thing that Christ himself does for us, we are healed toward the full communion of the body of christ. We become like him as we are opened to one another.
For me and for you, for now and for later
Christian charity pulses through the psalter. Should a man and woman married on a Friday hold to praying the Liturgy of the Hours on their wedding night, they would be led to recite that desolate psalm of suffering, Psalm 88, on what is perhaps the most joyous day of their lives. Praying in intimate union with the spouse with whom each has now become “one flesh,” the husband and woman would pray, “Friend and neighbor you have taken away: my one companion is darkness.” In the moment this is prayed, this is not, strictly speaking, true for the spouses; in fact, it is almost completely the opposite of what they are presently experiencing and celebrating. But in addition to bending their minds and hearts in prayer away from their own present condition, they are also exercising what is at the heart of their married vocation: allowing their union to be a source of charity for others. In many places that very night, there are those who sit alone, in isolation, under a thick blanket of suffering, knowing only their misery and heartache. For them, darkness does indeed appear to be the only companion. And yet, because members of the body of Christ pray the words of the lonely one’s condition as if they were their own, the lonely one is not alone anymore. Someone has joined them. In prayer, the sufferer is not left to suffer alone.
But what about lonely people who pray this prayer of loneliness? They may pray in the sure confidence that they do not offer their own prayer by themselves. Not only does Christ himself voice this prayer with them, but so too do fellow members of his body. By entering into this prayer, a lonely person offers his own loneliness to the body of Christ.
On alternating days and with different prayers, the lonely and suffering person who holds to the practice of praying the psalms will be led and stretched to inhabit conditions she could not create for herself. Such would be the case for someone like the Episcopalian theologian Kathryn Greene-McCreight who, as someone who suffers from severe bipolar disorder, regularly finds herself in deep, depressive states.
“Sometimes I think the only way for me to be grateful is to pray the psalms,” she writes in “Darkness Is My Only Companion.” “To pray the prayers of Israel. To wrap my tongue around the gracious words of others, in hopes that their words will nourish my soul, somehow sink and sprout into trees of righteousness, into songs of hope. Because I have no words of gratitude in me, only shame at the absolute hardness of heart.”
There are others in the body of Christ who experience the gratitude Greene-McCreight longs for. By the charity pulsing through the psalter, what they have is opened to her. By such charity a communion of saints is forged.
And yet again, that married couple who prays Psalm 88 on their wedding night, espousing words of sorrow and grief in the midst of their joy, are involved in another kind of charity, too. They are exercising charity for themselves, not as they presently are but as they someday may be. For when the day comes that one of them dies, the other will be left without his or her companion. They will know grief, and darkness may indeed surround them. Moreover, the one who has died will have entered into the grave, into a condition of darkness. Unlike their wedding night, on that day it will be difficult to find joy. But by praying Psalm 88 on Friday night after Friday night, they will have rehearsed well in advance the words that they would need when that sad day comes. They will have practiced reaching out to God from grief, from darkness; and if they cannot move their lips to form these words, their bones and indeed their souls will have carried those words with them. The charity that will have ripened in them is of those who have rehearsed well in advance the words they may need later. In this way, Christ will have been preparing them for how he will meet them later.
The Practice of Charity
For us Christians, we are given the words to embrace our full humanity, to strive to join each other in suffering and joy, and to allow ourselves to be united to Christ Our Lord who has humbled himself to share all things with us. The psalms are those words. They are not the words we would choose for ourselves; indeed, they are prepared for us in advance. Our duty is to pray what is given.
For those who seek to enter into the prayer of the psalms, perhaps for the first time or as a renewed practice, there are at least two ways to proceed. The first is to do what the Church does: pray the Liturgy of the Hours. A good place to start, even without instruction from someone else, is with the Shorter Christian Prayer book, which condenses this prayer down to its essentials.
The second way to enkindle this practice is, simply, to begin at the beginning. Make a practice of praying the psalms for 20 to 30 minutes each day. Start with Psalm 1. Read it through once, then a second time more slowly and perhaps while reading the notes in your Bible, then use a prayer journal to write down even just one thought or prayer or line that stands out to you (write no more than a page), and, finally, go through the psalm one more time to pray it as an offering to God. On the next day, move on to the next psalm, or else feel free to return to one you have already prayed if you feel called to do so.
Regardless of how you begin, what you may be certain of when you take on the prayer of the psalms is, as St. Augustine teaches, that we “say nothing apart from [Christ], as he says nothing apart from you.”
