Why we pray the psalms

We pray the psalms for many reasons. Here is an important one: we pray the psalms to express our solidarity with people who are suffering and in pain. As privileged “first-world” people, most of us have little personal experience with genuine poverty or communal misery. Our first-world culture urges us to purchase happiness, and so we buy memberships into book clubs, golf clubs, health clubs, camera and country clubs, associations and organizations of all sorts to make sure we’re on the road to satisfaction and pleasure. Life is a cruise.

The psalms point us in another direction so that we learn the preoccupations of God. In The Promise of Paradox Parker Palmer reminds us that we may bend our lives into God’s beloved poor:

It is the suffering already present in the world which we can either ignore or identify with. If pain were not real, if it were not the lot of so many, the way of the cross would be pathological. But in our world with its hungry and homeless and hopeless, it is pathological to live as if pain did not exist. The way of the cross means letting pain carve one's life into a channel through which the healing stream of the spirit can flow to a world in need.

The psalms, so often written by people “down under,” help us create and form an alliance with those who suffer affliction, anguish, discomfort, and hardship. In the psalms we hear the voices of alcoholics (it's much like going to an AA meeting), drug addicts, prisoners orphans, and widows. In the psalms we sing the songs of the unemployed, the tormented, the disfigured, and the mentally ill. These are the songs of those immigrants trapped in homelessness. These are the whisperings of the poor and suffering.

When we pray, say, sing, or chant the psalms we are taken away from our self-preoccupations and in solidarity join hands with the dispossessed, discouraged, and discomforted.

We pray the psalms because often it's a first step toward action. Here, like the Samaritan Jesus called “good,” we allow ourselves to look down into life’s ditches and find the wounded, bruised, and bleeding. In the psalms we take our eyes off the highway signs promoting self-success and find ourselves climbing down the highways' shoulder banks where most of the world’s people live, work, love, and die.

Yes, the psalms often express our personal emotional feelings. But they also articulate the distress of our brothers and sisters in the third-world, those who live across the tracks, and those who are largely unseen by most of us. In the psalms we listen for their voices, learn to sing their sobbings and lamentations, and eventually embrace, as best with the Spirit's help, their pain and suffering. We pray the psalms to enter the mind of Christ.

Image: Finding Grace