Finding Yourself in the Psalms

A Joyous Experiment

Author Kevin Adams' congregation, filled with both spiritual novices and veterans spent an entire year in the Psalms. "Along with preaching and study around the Psalms, we invited attendees to create their own 'Psalm experiment,'" he relates. One young mom created two. With her husband on a nine-month work assignment in the United Arab Emirates, she began reading Psalms to her young children each evening. They grew so captured by its images that when they missed a night of reading they insisted the need to read two “because we missed last night.” Her second experiment focused on reading Psalms for herself. She remembers, “at first they stretched me.” Soon after she started, she wanted to quit. But gradually she found herself struck by the authors’ honesty. Lacking any sense of restraint, they told God He wasn’t “doing His job right.” Such critique felt “foreign” and “hard to read,” she but also “freeing.”

A Family We Barely Knew

Such personal stories show surprising kinship to Jerome (a.d. 340-420) who so believed in the nourishing power of the Psalms, he advised mothers to learn Hebrew and teach the Psalms to their young children so together they could sing every Psalm in its original language. Such advice, coming from a world-class linguist, might appear overzealous to parents of energetic children. But generations later, this young Californian understood his purpose. In the crammed and daily routine of a young mother she found the Psalms to be prized companions, words that invited her home, to belong to a family she barely knew she had.

Sung by Bob Marley and Johann Sebastian Bach, Muslims and Jews, Protestants and Catholics -- the Psalms never exhaust their impact. Every day this ancient prayer book is used by left-wing Jewish feminists in New York’s Greenwich Village and right-wing, fourth generation Dakota ranchers driving F-150 pick-ups. Both an elegant court poet from 16th century Britain (George Herbert) and an impulsive rapper protesting drug deals on the tough urban streets of Chicago (Kanye West) quote psalms to comfort themselves and their listeners. Ageless, they are spoken with equal vigor by a monk chanting in a chilled medieval German cloister (Martin Luther), a priest orphaned as a teenager in communist Poland (Karl Wojtyla who became Pope John Paul II) and a modern-day Pakistani pastor in a half-built church struggling to find voice in Muslim culture. Whatever our continent or generation, the Psalms promise to nourish our soul.

A Special Grace

From 1977 to 1986 Natan Sharansky was imprisoned in the Gulag of the Soviet Union. Born to a Jewish family in what is now the Ukraine, Sharansky was convicted of spying and sentenced to thirteen years of hard labor. His wife Avital relentlessly campaigned for his release. Finally, in an elaborate international deal that included his exchange for Soviet spies captured by the west, he was granted freedom to immigrate to Israel. But when guards came to remove him from his cell, Sharansky refused to leave until they allowed him to take with him the book of Psalms that had been his companion. His act seems beyond belief. Why would a person threaten to remain in a Gulag prison for a book of psalms?

Ditching Spiritual Etiquette?

Often our contemporary spiritual etiquette is framed by sterile devotion. The spirituality we know, and frequently reject, is nice. Offering safe and sometimes formulaic prayers, we find our devotion ends not by gaining an audience with the Almighty, but in our giving up. We offer prayer, act morally, pay our dues, and it seems, walk away empty. Feeling the bankruptcy of our own prayers, we cash in our chips ... convinced faith doesn’t work. But for generations, the Psalms (and their stories) have invited people to a messy, muddled journey of faith that is far more engaging than our self-imposed pious standards allow, a journey that promises to be as unsettling as it is comforting.

When Going Through Difficulty

Peter Gomes, longtime minister of Harvard Memorial Church, once advised a woman about to undergo cancer surgery to read the Psalms straight through. He wanted her to immerse herself, to hear its unfamiliar but powerful images. She did as he suggested and when he asked how it went, she replied that she'd had no idea the psalmist knew who she was, her exact circumstance, what she needed and when. “When he rejoiced so did I,” she said, “and when he howled and cried out, I did too.” Gomes concludes that no one can read the Psalms without the sense of the psalmist’s insight into the depth and breadth of human experience.

The Most Human book ...

No wonder the Psalms are called the most human book of the Bible. Like a welcoming atrium, the words invite us in, throwing open the corridors of faith, bidding us bring our faith and doubt inside. They encourage us to come and know a God who might be unlike, even much unlike, the one we now imagine, or reject. Maybe God is more wild, more unpredictable, more passionate, and more for us than we imagined. British Benedictine Sebastian Moore writes, “God behaves in the Psalms in ways He is not allowed to behave in systematic theology.” And so do His followers. In the Psalms we find ourselves and our emotions—even those embarrassingly raw, ugly or spiritually uncouth.