In an earlier posting I indicated that I’d try to provide you with some chapter summaries of Cynthia Bourgeault’s Chanting the Psalms (hereafter CP).

Because most of us in our group are primarily looking forward to learning how to sing or chant the Psalms, it may be best if we don’t spend too much on Part One. Part Two: Chanting the Psalms is where the rubber will hit the road for us. For that reason, if you have the book, you may want simply to look over Part One while I summarize it for you in the weeks ahead. Otherwise, simply read the summaries as they come to you and be well prepared to learn how to sing the psalms!

This means that on January 24, we will go almost immediately to Part Two, focusing on Chapter 7: “Finding Your Voice” and Chapter 8” “Suzuki Psalmody.” After we spend about an hour discussing a chapter or two, listening to the CD that accompanies CP, and practicing chanting ourselves, then before or at 8:00, we’ll decide what to do for the next week, do Evening Prayer together, and then give one another a big hug, hoping to see each other on January 31, where we’ll pick up where we left off. All this means that we do not want to rush anything or set predetermined goals; we’ll feel and sing our way into singing the psalms and see what happens.

Let's get started by taking a preliminary look at what happens in CP’s Part One: “The Hidden Wisdom of Psalmody,” This section has six chapters. In the first, Bourgeault explores the psalms’ historical settings; in the second she traces how the Church has sung the psalms down through the centuries; her third chapter likens singing the psalms to Christian “yoga"; in chapter four Bourgeault describes the psalms’ usefulness for personal and communal growth; in five she suggests that the psalms help us develop a “unitive imagination"; and finally in six, she shows us some of the books and psalters we have for our exploration into psalm singing.

Chapter 1: The Hidden Wisdom of Psalmody

This is the only chapter in which you get what is anything like a conventional introduction to the book of Psalms. “When it comes to the psalms,” Bourgeault is convinced that “we are standing on some of the most ancient holy ground in our common Judeo-Christian heritage” (9). When chanting, we sing what Jesus and his ancestors were singing, depending on the psalm, for well over a thousand years. While some psalms may well predate King David (c. 1000 BC), “the bulk of the psalms” are thought to have been composed between 800-200 BC, a concentration of centuries which many historians call “the axial period,” a time when human consciousness underwent a world-wide transition from global identity (membership in a tribe) to emergent consciousness of an individual identity (11-12). In short, during the axial period the ancient emphasis on the pronouns we, us, and our opens to a new sense of I, me, and mine. Importantly, this emergent “individual expressiveness of the psalms in not the same as the rugged individualism of the nineteenth-century romantic poets, such as Keats or Byron” (16), for whoever says “I,” “my,” and “mine” in the psalms never sings apart from his people, his homeland, his community, and the memory of his mothers and fathers. In the psalms the individual is always in the midst of his people, God’s chosen people.

That, in summary, is what Bourgeault wants to emphasize in Chapter 1. I’ll try to get the summary of Chapter 2, “Early Monastic Psalmody,” out to you in a day or so.

Learning to chant the psalms, --Andy