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| Psalm 126 by Anna Armstrong for Park Church, Denver |
The psalms invite us to risk the love of God and neighbor and of the world that surrounds us with the reassurance that we do not venture this risk alone. We venture it together with an extraordinary company of fellow pilgrims across the ages. We would dare to tell our secrets to the community of God because we are confident, or, at the very least, we hold on to some shred of faith, that the steadfast love of God stands behind and before us, above and below us. + W. David O. Tayler, Open and Unafraid
This year I got to take a step of faith and obedience to orchestrate and facilitate a retreat in central Massachusetts for servant leaders across various Christian faith traditions. Sisters and brothers from Pentecostal, Baptist, Charismatic, Congregational, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Reformed backgrounds joined together at St. Mary's Monastery and St. Scholastica's Priory in Petersham, Massachusetts to soak in some silence and solitude, readings, Psalms, Benedictine hours, prayers, and whatever God had in store for each of us, as well as all of us together. As I have experienced some "Abbey Awe" with God in previous retreats, I was praying that each of the participants would experience some of the same in their own way during this special time.
In preparation for our time together in this space, I recommended three books for each person to choose one from to read before the retreat:
+ David Taylor's Open & Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life
+ Leighton Ford's The Attentive Life: Discerning God's Presence, and
+ Tracy Balzer's Thin Places: A Journey into Celtic Christianity.
Excerpts we read during the retreat from The Attentive Life can be found in the post, Lanterns, Fireworks & Stars: "Only One Thing Is Needed", as well as at the end of the post, In the Holy Wild with the Lion Who Offers Us the Stream (see the story about the Masai Chief).
This post captures a reading from Open & Unafraid about the Psalms, all 150 of which are sung and prayed throughout one week at St. Mary's and St. Scholastica's as part of their Benedictine tradition in praying the seven hours each day. (Check out one Protestant church's incredible Christ in the Psalms Artwork along with recent books, Sheltering Mercy: Psalms 1-75 and Endless Grace: Psalms 76-150, for why the psalms are essential across various Christian faith traditions, too.) As to why praying through all the Psalms each week has been a centuries-old steadfast tradition of Benedictine monks and nuns, this excerpt from Taylor's work provides a glimpse.
Read the psalms, one after the other, and find yourself at home with God, from whom no secrets are hidden; each of us is standing alongside saints and sinners, walking with both the faithful and the faithless, open and unafraid, because we all have been marked by the steadfast love of God.
+ David Taylor's Open & Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life
The psalms illuminate the mind for the purpose of enkindling the soul, indeed to put it to fire. It may need be said that the purpose of the Psalms is to turn the soul into a sort of burning bush.
+ Stanley Jaki
We Would Dare to Let the Psalms Teach Us How to Pray
We trust that in the Psalms, we discover that Jesus Himself, the One who knows every grief and every joy of the human heart, both enables and embodies our own prayers.
In reading the poetry of the psalms, we would discover that it is through these musical, metaphor-rich words, which force us to slow down and pay attention, that we encounter God as both intimately familiar and strangely mysterious.
In singing the psalms, we would discover that we are not alone. We are not the first to feel the sadness of loss, the anger of injustice, the confusion and disorientation of doubt, or the I'm-so-happy-I-could-pop joy of rescue and redemption. We would discover, likewise, a way for all things to be told in community, both those things that we would gladly announce from the hilltops and those things that we might prefer to keep secret, so that God might heal us and lead us "in the way everlasting" (Ps. 139:24).
In praying the psalms, we would recognize the voice of others, in different circumstances than ours, perhaps, who cry out to God, "How long?" Here we would find permission to lay open before God our griefs and infirmities, which we might be ashamed to confess before others.
We would find a way to pray angry prayers without being overcome by our anger, and how to curse in context, how to hate without sinning, how to cuss without cussing at all the damnably awful things that mark our broken world.
We would also find a powerful desire to join the trees and the mountains in their shouts for joy. Like the birds of the air, we, too, would make merry; we, too, would clap our hands with the rivers. Like all of creation, we, too, would yearn with painful hope for the sweet fullness of joy to be made manifest.
With a freedom that we never suspected was ours, we would choose to believe the words of the Psalter, which enjoin us to name our enemies and to expose them and to rebuke them and, in Jesus' name, to love them and to release them and to serve them.
We would choose to do justice. We would not simply bemoan the tragic losses or the ungodly acts of injustice. We would also stand up for the poor, the needy, the widowed, the orphaned, the vulnerable, the alien, the stranger, and all who are oppressed—and bring them all before God in prayer, asking Him, in mercy, to be a Just Judge who makes all things right.
We would pray these things with open eyes. We would pray these things knowing that many of our prayers might never be fulfilled in our lifetime, and that death, like a monstrously terrifying force, confronts us daily with our mortality, reminding us that we are but dust. And yet we would also pray that, though we may be like grass that withers, God would make us to be a life-giving tree, deeply rooted in the "fountain of life," in the God who is the Author of life that is truly life.
We would pray and sing and read and recite and meditate on all these words of the psalms, but never as a purely solitary act. We would pray them with peoples from every tongue, tribe, and nation. We would pray them with the company of the faithful from every time in history and from all the cultures of the earth. And along with all sorts of peoples, in all kinds of circumstances, we would join the praise of creation—the praise of angels and archangels, of morning stars and fathomless ocean depths, of sea dragons and herds of cattle, of fire and hail, of apple orchards and cedar forests, of "robust men and women in their prime, and yes, graybeards and little children" (Ps. 148 THE MESSAGE). We would join creation's inarticulate praise, and we would offer up our own articulate praise of God, the Creator and Re-Creator of all things. How long would we join creation's praise? As the psalms see it, as long as we live and breathe and have our being, and as long as God lives, which is forever and ever, world without end.
The Psalter opens with echoes of Genesis and it closes with a symphony of cosmic praise. In William Brown's words, "Psalm 1 begins the pilgrimage and anticipates the destination." To see the psalms in this way is to see ourselves on "the way." We do not, of course, walk this way alone. We walk alongside others who seek to remain faithful to God.
We walk through these one hundred and fifty poems, Christ's own prayer book, in the hope that we will perceive the shape of faithful prayer, faithful witness, faithful living, faithful friendship, and faithful work. We walk this way, ultimately, with Jesus, for whom these psalms are his heart song. And like Jesus, we read and sing, and pray the psalms along "the way" out of love.
The gospel of John tells us that Jesus does everything so the world will know that He loves His Father (John 14:31), who in turn loves the Son (John 15:9), and whose Spirit makes the love of God ours as well (Rom. 5:5). This being true, then, Jesus also prays the psalms for love's sake.
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| "JESUS" BY BAS UTERWIJK | POST PHOTOGRAPHY |
With Jesus and in Jesus' name, we, too, would pray the psalms, trusting that they will open up a space in our hearts to give and to receive the steadfast love of God, from whom no secrets are hidden. We, too, would pray with the psalmist that God's steadfast love will meet us in our hour of need (Ps. 59:10). We, too, would pray, "I love you, O LORD" (Ps. 18:1), with whatever faith we could muster. And we, too, would pray the words of Psalm 31:23-24 in the hearing of all creation:
Love GOD, all your saints;
GOD takes care of all who stay close to Him,
But He pays back in full
those arrogant enough to go it alone.
Be brave. Be strong. Don't give up.
Expect GOD to get here soon.
(THE MESSAGE)
+ Excerpt above from the Conclusion of David Taylor's Open & Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life, pgs. 188-191
Here are links to other recent City Notes (CN) books:
Seeds of Hope in the Rain & the Dark; Wrestling with God in Doubt; Baptism as the Way of Life; Being with God; Listening Closely & Paying Attention; Living and Loving Curiously with Wonder; Waiting is the Womb; In the Holy Wild with the Lion Who Offers Us the Stream; Yeshua; An Unexpected Story of Discovering Jesus; Only One Thing Is Needed
Christ is all,
Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan
Email Pastor Mike | Website | Visit Us | Support Us | Facebook Us
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