Praying the Psalms

This past weekend I attended a conference on ancient scripture and early church fathers. To bridge the gap between the ending time Friday night at 9pm and the beginning time Saturday morning at 9am, we, as a conference, read through the Psalms. Split into two hour shifts and then individually taking fifteen minutes of reading at a time, the Psalms were prayed through one and a half times. While I did not spend the entire night at the church I did come early in the morning around 5:30 to listen and then helped read from 6 to 8am. Hearing the Psalms read in a quiet sparsely populated sanctuary was quite moving. It is hard to put words to, but the experience was transcendent but completely real at the same time. With the lights low and eyes shut in contemplative prayer and reading, minutes of prayer turned into hours of praise. While I listened to the Psalms being read, the prayers of ancient Jews became my prayers, their words my words, their anxiety, frustration, hopelessness, became my anxiety, frustration and hopelessness. But Psalm after Psalm, cry for help after cry for help, each Psalm found room for praise. In Psalm 109 verse 1 the poet writes, "Do not be silent, O God of my praise. For wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me, speaking against me with lying tongues." In the same breath that the writer is describing his despair, he is also singing God's praise! How much we can learn from these ancient Psalms.

I have been reading two Psalms every morning and two each night for some time now. When I first began reading them they were something that I had to get through to get to the Gospel reading. However, reading the Psalms for me has become a beginning for the prayer that I carry with me throughout the day. The cries for safety in troubling times of encroaching enemies plays through my head as I walk to school and think of the many homeless that live around me who have no shelter, who feel vulnerable to enemies encroaching in on them at all times. I pray for the many unnamed homeless that they may find shelter in God, and that God may use me and the community to provide for their needs as well. While my daily troubles seem tame compared to homelessness, hunger, and war, none the less, reading the faith that these ancient Jews had inspires me to have a more real faith which cries out to God in my times of hardship and loneliness while at the same time proclaiming the praise due to God.

In an attempt to bring the Psalms more fully into my life as prayer I hope to reflect on the Psalms and my own prayers here.