A short (and personal) history of the Psalms
12 Apr 2010
The book of Psalms, I’ve recently discovered, are often ignored by those who should know better. Two recent experiences have highlighted that some Christians either don’t know their content, or don’t appreciate their richness in our daily life and their contribution to helping us pray. The first was a reasonably biblically literate woman who hadn’t read Ps 137 before. I had read it to a bible study group which meets each week and they were amazed and shocked with its content. On reading it this woman had been confronted with its raw emotion and the theological issue of how can this material be included in the Bible. (Ps 137 records the vengeance upon the Edomites which the Israelites looked forward to. It is brutally honest in recording the hatred the Israelites had for the Edomites and the Babylonians for their destruction of Jerusalem. It does not conform to our expectations (often polite and sanitised), of how God’s people should pray. It concludes with the shocking words: ‘. . . blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little one and dashes them against the rock! (137:8-9) (ESV)
The second experience was at the side of a hospital bed when the person I was reading a Psalm to, ‘heard’ it speaking right into their heart and situation. It brought great comfort and deep assurance that God could be trusted through this period in which they found themselves in a difficult place, confined to a hospital bed with uncertainty about their medical condition. Across the years, many of the Psalms have become very special and significant due to the way they have spoken to my condition at the time. I would like to give you a brief history, one which is unashamedly personal, of the ones which have been significant.
I remember the first time I heard Psalm 88 read, but I can’t remember the details exactly of the person who opened my eyes to its meaning. I am sure I’d read this Psalm on many occasions before, but this time, the context was different. I was in a Bible college, it was the beginning of the term and we had been put into a fellowship group for mutual support and prayer for the remainder of the year. Various people had shared to introduce themselves to the group. Nothing too deep had been revealed. Then an overweight woman in her mid twenties, who was not particularly attractive, said that she would like to read Ps 88 to us. Sure go ahead we all thought.
But no one had read this Psalm the way she read it to us, deliberately, at a slow pace in which we heard her pain, abandonment and desolation. I sat there wondering why I’d never noticed this Psalm before. (We had studied the next Psalm, Ps 89, extensively when doing the Davidic kingdom and covenant in Old Testament studies.) When she finished she briefly explained why she had chosen this Psalm. She was in her early twenties and had suffered depression intolerably since her mid-teens. On several occasions she had attempted suicide seeking relief from the interminable emotional pain. This Psalm was her story, her journey, her life. It was not only describing her experience of depression but her experience of God – who was often felt to be absent. We were silent. We hadn’t known her background until now. We felt privileged to have heard her heart cry to God and the only way I can describe it was that we had a sense of standing on holy ground. Psalm 88 is the only Psalm out of the one hundred and fifty which comprise the book in which there is no hope, no ultimate turning to God, no deliverance or redemption. There is no interior shift toward God which results in hope. Only desolation. God is silent and he is accused of being the agent who has caused her imprisonment in this depression (vs 6, ‘You have put me in the depths of the Pit . . .’ and vs 8, ‘You have caused my companions to shun me . . . ‘)
Over the years my interest in the Psalms has waxed and waned. Lately (which for me is in the past 12 years), it’s been renewed. One reason has been my exposure to the Benedictine rhythm of using the Psalms in daily life. This exposure has come from two sources, visiting a Benedictine monastery several times and through the writing of Kathleen Norris in her book, The Cloister Walk. Kathleen is a poet by training and instinct. She had abandoned what little faith she had as a teenager, but came back to it in mid-life. She spent two extended periods in a Benedictine monastery and allowed the daily rhythm of singing the Psalms antiphonally in the choir to work its way into her consciousness and heart. She discovered that the Psalms are rich in poetic language, with metaphor, simile, hyperbole and metonymy all at work. She also discovered the raw human emotion which they vent and most particularly, how they give us a voice to our own emotions which we are either too afraid to express or unable to articulate, to God and to ourselves. They are simply honest. Both Ps 137 and Ps 88 give a voice to what is unspeakable, to what we would not talk about in polite company. They are written by people, to use the American expression, ‘ who come from the other side of the tracks.’ As I began to poke around in the Psalms, I discovered there is a lot more passages like these two Psalms. For example, there is Ps 109:6-20.
Last year I realised that I was not particularly familiar with one section of the 150 Psalms which one can choose from. Like most Christians who know something about the beginning, the middle and the end of the Bible, and argue vociferously over the meaning of these passages which tend to be the most obscure and difficult to interpret, I knew the early Psalms (1-45), the middle ones (80-100), and a few of the end ones (148-150). There are individual Psalms which stick out for various reasons, but there is much unexplored territory remaining in between. What I decided to do was to read just the same ten Psalms over a one month period. I decided I would read just Psalms 120 to 129. When I’d read them through, I would go back to the beginning and repeat the process until I was reasonably intimate with them. To do this, I would start my time of meditation and prayer with God each morning with just a portion of the Psalm or if it was short, the entire Psalm. After a month, they had become as familiar as the voice and mannerisms of any of my old friends.
