THE POETRY OF the psalms preserves the immediacy of human experience. Joy is unchecked by the sobering of time. Despair and hope flow freely, void of the broader perspective that we get well after the moment has passed. Yet these prayers do not leave us to our own devices. They bridge us to the Divine; they remind us of God's promises to which they then embolden us to lay claim.
The Psalms preserve the heart's cries in language, images, and movements spacious enough to find our own experiences. Nane Alejandrez of Barrios Unidos tells about giving a copy of the Psalms to gang members, and how they were startled at such accurate descriptions of being hunted down and of having blood on your hands. It was a shock to their systems to find their lives in something they considered so wholly foreign. Little soothes like the balm of another's witness.
However, the Psalms are far more than survivor literature. Regardless of the depth of despair, the hope and belief persists that God can respond and deliver. God's blessings are reiterated, at times with an initial forced cheer, until the energy of remembered deliverance produces calm. It is the pattern of remembering and believing after which we model the Eucharist.
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THE PSALMS DEFY our notions of profane and sacred, proving that everything we feel, witness, do unto others, and have done to us is acceptable subject matter for conversing with the Divine. They invite us to bring every part of ourselves into our houses of worship. If we omit expressions of faith lost, of rage, of disdain, and of the desire for revenge, we leave parts of ourselves at the door. Worse, we exclude those mired in these experiences. Prayer has the capacity to invite the healing, judging, transforming power of God to soak into our beings, landing precisely where we most need it, connecting us with the hope that the psalmist is able to gain at the end of his petition.
We need the Psalms in these days of little imagination. In an effort to de-fang the God of vengeance, we render God toothless and babbling, cozy and squishy, rather than eminent and awesome. We have lost our capacity to be shocked, to be humbled and amazed, which undercuts our creativity and leaves our language shallow and sterile. We "share" rather than "tell." We explain rather than show. In the comfort and numbness of our age, we have put our words on Prozac, with sterilizing affect. Given the sensibilities of our age, were the canon being selected today large portions of this collection would likely end up on the cutting room floor. After all, we have turned Noah's ark into a children's toy.
Yet we are called to be awake, not anesthetized. This posture of alertness allows us to enter into God's creation and to create ourselves. To do so requires the profound awe and humility that comes with a deep knowledge of our place in the world. On this Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:
The root of any religious faith is a sense of embarrassment, of inadequacy. It would be a great calamity for humanity if the sense of embarrassment disappeared, with an answer to every problem. We have no answer to ultimate problems. We really don't know. In this not knowing, in this sense of embarrassment, lies the key to opening the wells of creativity. Those who have no embarrassment remain sterile.
Without humiliation or judgment, the Psalms allow us to bare our souls to God. Our prayers reflect our finite view of things. Most of us wouldn't want them recorded for posterity's sake. The joy is we can rant about an enemy and our innocence, then move on to love and serve. If, however, all we do is sing about how misunderstood we are, then go home self-satisfied and unchanged, we have missed the point entirely. All humans have the capacity for power and powerlessness. We are the oppressors and oppressed; the abused and abusive. We rail at God not to let the evildoers escape punishment, and just as quickly are the ones facing the judgment seat and crying for mercy. With David, we are the righteous ones forced to hide from jealous Saul. And with him, we are the abusers of power, killing off Uriah, manipulating Bathsheba.
We all need to come to the mercy seat and fervently kneel. When our every cell screams out to God at how unfair it all is, we need to return, sobbing and exhausted, to the steadfast love and grace of God. Because life is not fair. If it were, we would all live in the fullness of our worst thoughts and actions, in ever-deepening separation from God.
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