Praying the Psalms

When I first entered the monastery, my biggest struggle was with the liturgy: a thrice daily chanting of the psalms - with scripture readings from the Catholic lectionary.

Although the monastery's early-morning start was a physical challenge for an insomniac night person, I found that a day punctuated by three chant liturgies and two meditations was incredibly invigorating. And I loved the liturgical rhythm of chant and silence, totally devoid of sermonizing.

In the Benedictine liturgy, silence is as important words. In fact originally, the words weren’t thought of as “prayer” at all, but preparation that opened a monk to listen in a following silence (often while lying prostrate on the floor). That receptive listening was the actual prayer.

If only the text didn’t leave me gritting my teeth.

Before my monastic sojourn, I was simply not a scriptural kind of gal. I'd always been easily inundated by divine presence while carving, writing or walking alone outdoors. I read some “teaching stories,” e.g., of the Zen or Sufi masters, and sayings texts such as the Tao or the Gospel of Thomas, but other sacred scripture of all traditions left me cold.

The Bible seemed immanently uninspiring, full of slaying, raping, pillaging, “holy” men who were abusive, drunkard fathers (Noah) or lecherous murderers (David), and an angry, judgmental God. And that was just the Hebrew Bible. In the Gospels, a poor fig tree was blasted for not bearing fruit out of season, masses of people were cast into outer darkness with gnashing of teeth, and “God” was so jealous, angry and cruel “He” could only be appeased by the torturous murder of an innocent.

Yet my call to Benedictine community was unmistakable. Right in the middle of a mundane social event, joyful radiance had filled my heart. From then on I was tethered to the monastery. It felt as if a thick cord of living light had grown out of my chest and been sunk into that land. After two years of “discernment” discussions, my call remained undeniable and the sisters agreed to take me.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the novitiate. I learned that the early Christian hermits like Evagrius or Syncletica (a Desert Mother) had a very Zen way of reading the psalms (as in Norman Fischer’s modern Zen translations). The "enemies" they asked God to smash or save them from weren’t other people, but their own derailing passions - fear, loneliness, boredom, anger or pride.

One Tuesday morning (the monastery’s first day of the work week), I was feeling mighty grim. The liturgy included psalm 88. This is the only psalm that starts as a lament, goes on as a lament and ends in despair with, "My only friend is death." All other psalms resolve upward with a last stanza of praise or thanks.

Psalm 88 fit my mood exactly.

A few days later I noticed that a joyous line from psalm 118, "this is the day our God has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it,” was playing like background music in my head all the time. I could dissolve any ugly feeling by tuning into it.

Yet saying ALL the psalms on a schedule generally meant praying emotions and concepts that were not mine at the time (if ever). At first a source of aggravation, this became a surprising source of spiritual vigor.

Most of us are used to prayer as asking for something we actually want. In scheduled praying of the entire Psalter, another person’s inspired words become a rope we can use to let ourselves down into the pool of spiritual energy that is always present - if only we can reach it. It is irrelevant whether we agree with the literal meaning of the words. The rope works either way.

This turns out to be incredibly powerful. Although daily psalm chanting was the most annoying part of monastic life when I entered, it is now the part I miss the most.

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