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Praying the Psalms

God has revealed to us how we are to praise Him — and the right way to praise God is found in the psalms.  The Holy Father, Pope Benedict, explains that the Psalms teach us how to pray to God.  His catechesis has ancient roots.  St. Athanasius passes on this same teaching he learned from St. Antony of the Desert at the end of the 3rd Century.  The psalms teach us how to raise our hearts in prayer just as Jesus raised his heart in prayer.

The praying of the psalms, especially in the Liturgy of the Hours, is a school for the heart, providing words for interior movements so delicate and beautiful, the heart itself is scarcely aware of what they are and without divine help powerless to articulate them.  It is a matter of learning how to “feel” about God and all things in relation to God in a manner that truly renders fitting praise.  This perfection, the heart feeling what it ought to feel before God, lived in the heart of Christ informing every word and thought He offered the Father.  Conforming our hearts to the Heart of Christ is a work of the Holy Spirit to which the psalms dispose the soul.  In fact, the Word himself prayed the psalms — and based on his own teaching on prayer, he must of prayed the psalms with complete attentiveness to every thought and emotion they disclose, complete confidence in how our heavenly Father would receive such prayer, and complete attention to who He was to be offering such prayer.

Earlier this year, Father Benedict Groeschel offered the annual retreat to our seminarians.  It was an honor to have an opportunity for a short conversation with him after the retreat while taking him to the airport.  Just before we left, one of the seminarians asked me to find out how Father Groeschel prays the psalms.  So I asked him.  He answered with one word, “Slowly.”

This would seem to be the best way for us to allow the psalms to teach us the movements of the heart of Christ.  When we pray them slowly and consider what the psalms contain – that “range of human experience” the psalms convey, as Pope Benedict reminds us – it gives ours hearts the time they need to catch up and to appropriate the psalms to our lives. Even better, taking time to thoughtfully consider what we are offering the Lord in these revealed prayers affords the Holy Spirit the opportunity to appropriate our lives to the psalms.  In this kind of prayer, our lives become the praise we offer.

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Psalm 22 and the Prayer of Christ from the Cross

“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”  Last Saturday, following a conference on the last seven words of Christ, a few retreatants asked about these words.  They wanted to know whether Jesus actually felt abandonned.  They had heard that the reason he recited the first words of Psalm 22 was not really to express his own personal feelings as much as to reassure his disciples that God would be victorious even in the face of the cross. 

To hold this, however, is to make a facade out of the whole passion of the Lord.  It is true that the words of Jesus are meant to reassure us.   Yet to hold that he did not actually feel what they suggest makes the cross far too abstact and intellectually acceptable.   For those who want to begin to pray like Jesus, we must realize that he never said anything he did not fully mean.  When he said these words, he was truly disclosing his own agony.  Only when we attend to the real anguish behind these words can we find the courage to pray when we too feel abandoned.  To understand the rest of this post, I recommend actually praying this psalm attending to the tension between the evil that is experienced and the faith which adheres to the truth.

Psalm 22 contains two movements of the heart that seem completely contrary to one another, an awareness of overwhelming wickedeness and of the faithfullness of God which seems impossible to sustain.   In the beginning of the psalm, a man ravished to death with holes torn in his hands and feet is complaining to God because God does not seem present or mindful of his plight.   He is not only abandoned by God but also surrounded by enemies who have frightened, overpowered and consumed him – dogs, bulls and lions.   His clothes have been stripped off and stolen, the object of a game.  He is completely vulnerable with no one to protect him.   This is what he experiences and this is what others see as his actual situation.   This experience is not the last word.   Though he feels completely forsaken, he chooses to praise the Lord and to believe in his goodness.  This second movement of heart seems completely discongruous with what has actually happened to him.   How is it possible to believe that God is mindful of “the affliction of the afflicted” when He seems so absent in the face of great suffering?

Those who do not believe that Jesus actually suffered this tension know very little about the mystery of the Cross or the power of the Christian faith.   It is the cross and only the all too dirty bloody mess of the cross that creates the spiritual space by which true friendship with God is established.   It is only because Jesus knows what the absence of God truly is that He is able to reveal the glory of the Father to those who also suffer this absence.  

What is most difficult about human suffering is not the physical or even psychological pain, but most of all the awareness that suffering renders life meaningless.  There are those moments when our hearts are completely gripped by the crushing discovery that there is no human or natural reason to hope, not only for oneself, but especially for all those one loves the most.  I cannot help but think that when Jesus began to pray Psalm 22, the anguish He felt included the knowledge that all those who would follow Him would have to undergo the same overwhelming sense he was drinking in at that moment:  like Him, as they struggled to cling to the Father, they would feel that their own prayers were rejected, that their own faith was without purpose.

Here is the reality.  The abyss of human misery, an abyss we will inevitably fall into as we approach the reality of our own death, involves a kind of rejection that the Lord suffers with us.   It is when we feel most abandoned by God in our efforts to love Him and those entrusted to us that we are most intimate with Him in this life.  Such suffering love is always redemptive, especially when it is rejected and despised.  The persecution of such faith opens up deep caverns in the human heart through which God’s love can flow into the world, if we remain faithful in believing in him.  The reality is, loving faith in the Lord does not take away suffering or the experience of abandonment.   Instead, it transforms it, endows it with meaning beyong what is natural, even beyond this life. 

The cross is a place of hope, the place of encountering God, not only because Jesus indicated that this was the case, but because He suffered the absence of the Father for us and with us, opening up a purpose and meaning for each of us which only faithfilled love can know.  The cross is the place where the absence of God and faith in Him collide so that God’s power might be revealed.   It is the divine power which discloses itself only in the midst of suffering that real hope can be invincibly based.   By this hope, the hope that flows from from the side of Christ, we find the courage to pick up our cross and follow the Lord.  Jesus knew, even in the face of his own experience, that God is mindful of the affliction of the afflicted.  By becoming completely one with him in his death, we, members of his Body, “proclaim His deliverance to a people yet unborn.”

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Psalm 23

The Lord is my Shepherd! Now St. Athanasius explains that unlike the rest of the scriptures that explain what to believe or how to live, the psalms reveal the holy affections that God stirs in our hearts. This psalm is called to mind especially in the death of those we love. There is something about this psalm that reveals the holy desires God grants us in the face of death.

My heart turns to this psalm today because of the readings at mass, and because of a conversation with good friend who lost his son a few months ago. He said that there were not very many people who were willing to drink from the Cup of the Lord. What he meant was that there is something austere and sobering in the taste of the Cup of Salvation. I knew what he meant. I can still see him praying psalms over the body of his son through the night at his Eastern Rite Parish and I remember communion at the funeral liturgy. It was like passing through the shadow of the valley of death.

What is awesome about our Christian faith is that it is in this shadow that the Lord prepares a banquet for us. It is in the very face of death, whether we are actually dying or not, that the Lord offers us the same cup he drank the night before he died. The cup of the new covenant, the blood of the Lord, at this most difficult of times, is offered us.

Some people tell me that they are not really afraid of death, just the suffering beforehand. Can’t that suffering be escaped? Yet, attempts to escape it are dehumanizing, and betray us. The truth is suffering and death go together. They do cause us great fear. Something deep inside us rejects them. We want to fight against them. They are our enemies. But we do not have to face them alone. Holy Communion is called the medicine of immortality and a sacred banquet precisely because it gives us the life of Christ even in the face of our own suffering and death.

There are curious things about the banquet that is offered in the shadow of death, in the presence of our enemies. First, the nature of a banquet including especially the drink shared is that banquets are never enjoyed alone. There are always others present at a banquet – toasting is an experience shared with others. The banquet and cup of psalm 23 suggest that following Christ, though we go through the dark valley, is a pilgrimage that is taken together with his whole body. We are never alone. The second thing about a banquet is that even if sorrowful circumstances occassion it, there is always an element of joy in it — as if to say, as bad as things are right now, this sorrow is not the deepest reality about life — we have something wonderful to live for.

In psalm 23, it is in the presence of our enemies, these enemies of suffering and death and any other monster that comes with them, that the Lord spreads a banquet before us and gives us am overflowing cup. This cup can be thought of as the cup that Jesus asked be taken away from him, “But not my will, your will be done.” It can be thought of as the cup Jesus offered the night before he died. For those with faith, the cup that the Lord invites us to share is a cup of mysterious joy. It is always a joy, even in sorrow, to possess the Lord. And in sorrow, the Lord gives us himself in a special way. To this end, St. Catherine of Sienna will even speak of being inebriated with the blood of Christ.

This mysterious joy is renewed at every Mass but especially on Sundays, the day we remember the resurrection of the Lord. Today, going through twitter, I found a tweet from a young woman asking for prayers for her recently deceased father. He died in Saigon. I did not know who she was, but I understood where she was. I thought of Joel Barstad’s words about the cup of the Lord and how few want to drink it. But he chose to drink it, and we his friends drank it with him, because he and his family stood with his son in the shadow of death. May Greg Barstad and the father of this young lady whom we do not know, and the souls of all the faithful departed dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

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