Life in the Psalms

Life in the Psalms

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Life in the Psalms Contemporary Meaning in Ancient Texts Patrick Woodhouse

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YOR K • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Continuum An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury, Continuum and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Patrick Woodhouse, 2015 Patrick Woodhouse has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

Texts of the Psalms are taken from Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England. Published by Church House Publishing, 2000 © The Archbishops’ Council 2000. Used by permission under licence.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for.

ISBN: PB: 978-1-4729-2314-1 ePDF: 978-1-4729-2316-5 ePub: 978-1-4729-2315-8 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

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Contents Introduction ix 1 Why the Psalms? 1 2 What are the Psalms? 13 3 Praying the Psalms 23

First Week Pilgrimage 31 Psalm 122

The peace of Jerusalem 33

Psalm 84

Journeying towards integrity 41

Psalm 133

Oil running down 49

Psalm 42

Deep calls to deep 55

Psalm 43

What is true? 63

Second Week Prayer 67 Psalm 63

Come and see 69

Psalm 123

Mercy within mercy within mercy 77

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Contents

Psalm 131

Like a weaned child 83

Psalm 1

A tree planted by the waterside 87

Psalm 4

y heart, their corn and wine M and oil 95

Third Week Wonder 103 Psalm 8

Infants and stars 105

Psalm 104

Wonder and protest 111

Psalm 19

A theatre of glory 121

Psalm 139

The uttermost parts of the sea 129

Psalm 103

Forget not 139

Fourth Week The Way 145 Psalm 119.1–8

The path of happiness 147

Psalm 119.9–16

Mind change 155

Psalm 119.129–36 Passion and compassion 163 Psalm 23

Lacking nothing 169

Psalm 27

In a secret place 177

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Fifth Week Hope 185 Psalm 71

Hoping continually 187

Psalm 46

Be still and know 195

Psalm 36

The well of life 203

Psalm 121

rom where is my help to F come? 209

Psalm 62

Tottering and leaning 215

Holy Week Suffering 221 Psalm 91

Trampling the serpent 223

Psalm 13

How long, O Lord? 231

Psalm 137

By the waters of Babylon 235

Psalm 130

Out of the depths 243

Psalm 22

The image of the crucified 249

Notes 257 Acknowledgements 265

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s a Canon at Wells Cathedral for thirteen years, I became very familiar with the Psalms. Each evening in the quire of

the Cathedral they were sung as part of cathedral evensong. Each morning, in the silence and contemplative space of the Lady Chapel we recited them as part of our morning prayer. And yet, however familiar many of the phrases of these poems became, always they remained to me strange, even elusive. I could never escape the sense that these revered and ancient texts were from somewhere else, an ancient world far back in time whose meanings we cannot fully grasp. Between their ancient religious world and our contemporary secular world, there has always appeared to me to be a great gulf.

This book aims to address that gulf, and explore how in the midst of some of the issues and needs of our own times, these ancient texts can be re-imagined, so that their voices can more fully speak to us today.

The three introductory chapters set the stage. In these chapters, I ask the questions: Why the Psalms? What are the Psalms? And, conscious that these ancient songs and poems are prayers, how might we in our world now, pray the Psalms?

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The main part of the book consists of the texts of thirty Psalms taken from Common Worship, each followed by a reflection whose purpose is to enable them to be heard again. The reflections do not presume to prescribe a definitive interpretation for today, but aim to stimulate further thought and imagination as we seek to make sense of them in a world which in so many respects is fundamentally different from the one in which they were formed. The Psalms chosen are those that particularly speak to me, but there are many others that readily lend themselves to this challenge of re-imagining.

How to use this book For individuals This book has been prepared for Lent, primarily with individuals in mind who aim to ‘keep Lent’ reading and reflecting on a Psalm on a daily basis. So it has a particular shape. Five Psalms and reflections are printed for each of the six weeks of Lent, one for each weekday, beginning on the Monday following the first Sunday of Lent and ending on Good Friday. Saturdays and Sundays provide opportunity to read back over the texts and reflections of the preceding week.

The first days of Lent – from Ash Wednesday to the following Monday – could be a time to read through the three introductory chapters which prepare the ground for the Psalms that follow.

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Most Psalms cannot be easily categorized, but in each week there is, loosely, an overarching theme: MM

In week one, as Lent begins, there are Psalms which touch on pilgrimage and journeying.

MM

In week two, the emphasis is on the practice of prayer.

MM

In week three, the Psalms chosen take us into the experience of wonder.

MM

In week four, which includes three sections of Psalm 119, the way of faith is a theme.

MM

In week five, as we move towards Holy Week, there are Psalms which explore hope.

MM

Finally for Holy Week itself, there are Psalms exploring loss and suffering.

The book can of course be used at any time of the year, and some may prefer a slower pace over a longer period, perhaps reading and reflecting on one or two Psalms each week.

For groups The texts and reflections could also be explored in groups in Lent or at any time of the year. Below are suggestions of Psalms and reflections which may be more suitable for group discussion.

At the end of each of these reflections there are one or more questions to begin a discussion.

Week 1: Pilgrimage

122 and 133

Week 2: Prayer

123, 1 and 4

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Week 3: Wonder

8, 104 and 139

Week 4: The Way

119.9–16; 119.129–36, and 23

Week 5: Hope 71, 46 and 36 Holy Week: Suffering

137 and 22

Suggestions for study groups Most groups meet once a week for the six weeks of Lent. Here are two suggestions as to how groups could use this book.

MM

It would be helpful if everyone who attends the Lent group has their own copy of the book which they use during the week. At the group each week, each person would be invited to say, of the Psalms and reflections which they have read that week, which they found most helpful, and why, and what questions were prompted.

In the first week this would include the introductory three chapters. Then a wider discussion could ensue.

MM

The leader(s) of the group could choose two of the texts and reflections from the book which would then be discussed in the group. Everybody should have a copy of the text of the chosen Psalms which could be read aloud either responsorially by two groups taking alternate verses, or round the room. People are invited to share their thoughts and questions about the text of the Psalm before the reflection is read out, followed by further discussion.

Two Psalms could probably be covered in one evening.

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Why the Psalms?

Over a meal with friends in the local pub, we were chatting about how we were spending time. I mentioned that I was working on a book about the Psalms and, curious to know how these texts were perceived, I asked, ‘When you hear the word “Psalms” what comes to mind?’ There was a moment’s pause, before one of them, a strongly committed member of the Church of England and a long-standing lay reader, simply replied, ‘Oh dear’.

We laughed, and then she began to explain why, for her, other than some richly memorable verses, these ancient texts fail to generate any enthusiasm.

Were the question to be asked more widely, even among many church people, I suspect her response would not be untypical.

Reactions to the Psalms will of course vary hugely, depending on how much people see themselves as belonging or not belonging to a faith tradition, and to their experience of these texts.

Among people who do not belong to any faith tradition and are dismissive of the claims of religious faith, there might

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be recognition of the cultural value of the Psalms, but as for them being a resource for living in the secular scientific world of the twenty-first century, that would probably be regarded as ridiculous.

In contrast, among those for whom faith is important there will be many, certainly many within the Jewish tradition from which they come, who will treasure them.

They will treasure them because more than any other Old Testament texts they go to the heart of Hebrew religion, and – because they are prayers – tell us from the inside what it means to believe in the God of the Exodus, the God of the giving of the Law at Sinai, and the God who came to dwell in the great Temple in Jerusalem. So the Psalms remain to this day at the heart of Jewish worship.

Many in the Christian tradition will treasure them too, not least because they shaped the mind of Jesus of Nazareth, who would have almost certainly known them by heart. In the New Testament they are quoted more than any other book of the Old Testament. Many of the Psalms were understood as prophetic texts fulfilled in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and from its beginnings the church has read the Psalms through the lens of its faith in Jesus as the Messiah. So they remain at the heart of Christian worship. In monasteries, cathedrals, churches and homes – wherever down the centuries Christians have gathered to pray – the Psalms, sometimes read, often chanted or sung, have been central to the life of prayer.

So they are loved and treasured by many. And yet, though they are at the heart of these traditions, I suspect that within

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the Church there are many, like my friend, who, when asked, would say that they feel ambivalent about them. They know their central place in the Judaeo/Christian story. They recognize that they have been a profound resource and encouragement to generations who have prayed them down the centuries. And yet hearing them read and sung in worship today they find them strange and forbidding, and from another world that they cannot recognize. Nevertheless, they might add, there are verses within them that they do indeed treasure.

And that is how, I suspect, even among regular churchgoers the Psalms are largely known. As fragments. As dislocated individual verses, that nevertheless carry profound meaning.

A particular verse can remain an important part of a person’s spiritual memory even though the original context of that verse may have been forgotten, if it was ever known. Perhaps the fragment has become embedded through association with a particular person, place or occasion – through a baptism, wedding or funeral. But how that particular fragment fits within the meaning of the Psalm from which it originally came, may well be a mystery.

The opening line of Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my shepherd’, is probably the best known line of the psalter. The opening line of Psalm 121, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help’, is another cherished text. If asked to name a favourite Psalm, 84 might be mentioned, but it is likely that it will be remembered through the one verse referring to the sparrow finding ‘her an house and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young’. The haunting line from Psalm 139, ‘If I take the wings

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of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me’, evoking a Presence that will never fail even in the most extreme circumstances, may resonate with many. The robust confidence of the opening line of Psalm 46, ‘God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble’, is also very familiar. The first line of Psalm 137, ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion’, will be widely known not least because of the hit single of the band Boney M. The later line in the same Psalm, ‘how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’, evoking the bitter experience of displacement, has entered common speech, but many who know the phrase might well not know where it comes from.

Those who have been choristers in cathedrals or sung in church choirs will know particular lines from the Psalms not so much because of the text, but because of memorable musical settings. ‘O taste and see how gracious the Lord is’ from Psalm 34 will be remembered because of the beautiful solo beginning of Vaughan Williams’s setting; the opening line of Psalm 122, ‘I was glad when they said unto me’, has been immortalized through Hubert Parry’s musical masterpiece; the line from Psalm 119, ‘Teach me O Lord the way of thy statutes’, will be familiar because of Thomas Attwood’s gentle lyrical setting; the first line of Psalm 84, ‘How lovely are thy dwellings fair’, is known through the music of Brahms’s Requiem. The list could go on and on.

However, beyond such fragments, for all the reciting and singing of them down the centuries, the Psalms as whole texts can come across, to the modern reader, as strange and difficult.

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And that should be no surprise, for these are ancient texts from an ancient world. Like any great literature the Psalms reflect the culture they have emerged from, and at first sight this culture does indeed appear to be very different from the world we know.

A cursory reading tells of a world centred on an all-powerful, ever-watchful God who is Creator, Rescuer and Guide of a persistently wayward people. This God is everything to these people, all their thinking and behaviour revolves around him.

Despite their disobedience and faithlessness this God seems to be endlessly merciful, but he can also be terrifying in his anger, a judge who is vengeful against enemies and punitive against his own people through natural causes or plague, though the Psalms also speak of him as a warrior going out with his people’s armies. A particular focus of the psalmist’s world would seem to be the great Temple on Mount Zion, where God dwells and where solemn feast days are celebrated, and sacrifices and burnt offerings are made. In the society that surrounds the Temple, we hear of kings being besieged by enemies and threatened by court intrigue in a world overseen by angels and evil spirits, and haunted by charmers and weavers of spells. It is a world in which the ‘wicked’ and the ‘righteous’ are constantly set over against each other, and where unidentified ‘enemies’ ever lurk.

Simply to list just a few features of the psalmist’s ancient world underlines how far from us it is. The world of these texts is not one we easily recognize. The gulf between it, and the scientific, technologically advanced secular world of the twentyfirst century in which – in the West anyway – religion has been

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pushed to the margins with the claims of faith appearing to many to be absurd, would appear to be vast.

How, we may well ask, can these ancient texts speak to us today?

We need to look deeper. Though these Psalms emerge from an ancient and we might say ‘primitive’ culture, they speak, often in the most evocative poetry, of issues that are perennial to the question of what it means to be fully human. The longing for justice, the emptiness of riches, care for the poor, delight in the created world, the quest for happiness, the search for integrity, the need for silence and solitude, the struggle with grief and loneliness and different kinds of mental illness, the recognition of mortality . . . these are just some of the many issues that the psalmist explores.

But at the heart of all of these explorations is the psalmist’s faith in a transcendent Other, the God of all the earth. To the contemporary mind, immersed in an aggressively secular culture, that perhaps is the really difficult thing.

But could it be that, notwithstanding the ancient cultural context in which this belief is expressed, the Psalms are in fact pointing to the greatest malaise of our times: the erosion of belief in a transcendent reality against which all our lives can be measured and shaped, and given hope and meaning?

In his Foreword to his book A Walk with Four Spiritual Guides, the writer Andrew Harvey tells of a conversation he had with the monk and mystic Fr Bede Griffiths in his ashram beside the River Kaveri in south India just a year before Bede died. In this conversation Bede speaks prophetically into the frightening

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confusions and chaos of our times and identifies the root of humanity’s need. Harvey writes: It is early December 1992. I am sitting with the eighty-six year old Catholic monk and mystic Father Bede Griffiths in his hut in the South Indian morning waiting for an Australian film crew, who is making a film of his life, to arrive. I am the host of the documentary. For eight marvellous days, Bede and I have been talking about God, the Church, the world’s mystical traditions, and the various stages of that search for truth that brought him to India forty years before.

Bede paused suddenly (we had been talking about his early love of the romantic poets) and then said, quietly and insistently, ‘You know, of course, Andrew, that we are now in the hour of God.’ Although it was a warm, fragrant morning, I shivered.

‘When you say “hour of God”, what do you mean?’

‘I mean that the whole human race has now come to the moment when everything is at stake, when a vast shift of consciousness will have to take place on a massive scale in all societies and religions for the world to survive. Unless human life becomes centred on the awareness of a transcendent reality that embraces all humanity and the whole universe and at the same time transcends our present level of life and consciousness, there is little hope for us.’1 The conversation continues with Bede exploring further what this ‘hour of God’ might mean, pointing ahead to some of the many crises of our present time that threaten humanity’s future.

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But his words about a ‘transcendent reality’ are the heart of the matter.

Unless human life becomes centred on the awareness of a transcendent reality . . .

Such an awareness lies at the heart of the Psalms. The one thing you cannot escape if you read the Psalms, is God. They are shot through and through with the divine presence, the divine grace and the divine call. This is why, despite the difficulties of their cultural context, they need to be valued and loved and known, not just as odd fragments but as whole texts, which, when deeply pondered can kindle faith afresh and reorientate a person’s entire perspective.

They do this ‘kindling’ not by argument – these are never theological treatises – but by totally assuming the reality of God. And God is not some vague focus of ‘spirituality’. He is the God of the Hebrew story, who is active and saving. The God of Abraham and the patriarchs, the God of Moses and the prophets, the God who rescues the enslaved and who, through ‘the law’ (and the Psalms have much to say about ‘the way of the law’), points to a holy and fulfilled life. Above all, he is the God who, even in the midst of our confusions and hatreds and capacity for destruction, loves humankind, and fulfils our deepest need, which is to worship.

And so to attentively read them is to enter their world and share – even if it may sometimes seem absurd – this assumption that God is, and in assuming it, discover that it just might be true.

In Chapter 3, ‘Praying the Psalms’, I touch on something of what this might mean, but here are some initial pointers.

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First, it is something that takes time. If you read the Psalms regularly over a long period, if you gradually internalize them, learning them by heart, and allow their words to penetrate to the deepest levels of your mind, what you begin to discover is that slowly you are ushered into another perspective altogether different from the one you know only too well, and is assumed by the world around you. What characterizes this new way of ‘seeing’ is a constant consciousness of a transcendent Other. It is a perspective which will slowly – if you remain attentive to the words of the Psalms and the meanings found in them – reorientate your mind, and lead to a different life. That is their silent transformative power.

Part of the way the Psalms work is through vivid contrast.

In contrast to the world of appetite and blindness to the needs of others, the world of arrogance and self-promotion, the world of ‘vanities’ and violence, the world of betrayal of moral trust and false identity and pretence, the world which has given up on the idea of God and any ultimate purpose – and this world the Psalms constantly refer to – these texts invite us to walk another way. Through connecting with their longings, through identifying with their pain, through sharing their praise, we are invited into a different mind-set.

This perspective is one in which, first, you find refuge from a world which can constantly threaten a person’s balance and integrity. ‘Refuge’ is a key metaphor of the Psalms. But finding such ‘refuge’ does not just happen. It has to be learned, and practised. It requires discipline, and, crucially, a surrender, a letting go of the insistent demands of the individual ego. The daily prayer time is a crucial part of learning what this means.

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Second, from that ‘refuge’, the Psalms invite you to live differently in the world. ‘Pathway’ is a second key metaphor.

‘Blessed are those whose way is pure, who walk in the law of the Lord’ is the first verse of Psalm 119. To read this Psalm particularly is to be reminded that ‘the law of the Lord’ is never an onerous or legalistic thing but rather a dynamic reality pointing the way to a life that is integrating and healing. In the Psalms ‘the law’ is a source of profound consolation and joy. This will become clearer as we explore specific Psalms.

‘Refuge’ and ‘pathway’ are two defining metaphors of the Psalms. At the heart of them is adoration. The Psalms recognize that the deepest impulse and need of the human heart is to love this mystery of Life called ‘God’, and they kindle that impulse afresh, again and again. So they are saturated with longing, sometimes expressed through anguish and pain, the pain of being alienated from God. And the inner landscape that this desire opens up is marked by thanksgiving and praise, and the discovery of a sense of wisdom, and profound homecoming.

So we are promised the deepest kind of joy that it is possible for humans to experience. At the end of the psalter the final Psalms are great exclamations of praise.

Finally, this direction of the human mind towards God, and this living with a constant awareness of God, is what life is for. But we may miss it. The Psalms remind us of the parables of Jesus which emphasize the immediate moment, and the danger of missing out.

They have an acute sense of the frailty and fleetingness of human life, and so repeatedly they convey a sense of urgency, the need to fully inhabit this different perspective now – while there is still time.

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But, and it is a big ‘but’, however much they bear this promise of a life-transforming perspective, the question of their cultural embeddedness remains. These are ancient texts from an ancient culture, and in some of them particularly the sheer antiquity and obscurity of their cultural world view together with the many references to places and events of that ancient time, make them feel alien and strange, and can obscure the hope they offer.

So, if they are truly to speak their message of refuge and pathway and love of God and all that that promises, they need to be re-imagined in our times in the context of the particular issues that concern us.

And that is not strange, for it is what, down the centuries, has always happened.

In her magisterial two-volume work on the reception history of the Psalms, Professor Susan Gillingham shows how these ancient texts have always been reworked according to the needs of different times.

In her final chapter of the first volume she gives the example of how just one Psalm – Psalm 137 – has been re-imagined again and again in different contexts. She writes: The advantage of the long perspective of nearly three thousand years of reception-history is that it allows one to see just how many ways a single Psalm can be interpreted.

Taking the twentieth century alone, and taking one Psalm, 137, as a typical example, its varying uses are quite extraordinary. It was a Psalm deemed inappropriate for some Christian liturgies because of its cursing language, yet

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it was a Psalm used by Reform Judaism to rekindle Zionist hopes. It was used in Roger Wagner’s woodcuts contrasting the ‘strange land’ with the London docklands; it was one of Vaughan Williams’ earliest compositions when he was still at the Royal School of Music; it was an unpublished composition by Howells in 1917 lamenting the atrocities of World War I; it was used by Walton in Belshazzar’s Feast to illustrate the celebration of the Jews at the downfall of an abusive foreign power; it has been used as a ‘reggae Psalm’, speaking about the exile from the Caribbean, as a protest against black oppression; and it was used by Harbison to address the ongoing adversity of the Jewish people. Each representation brings new light to bear on the familiar text, and together they make it very clear that it is impossible to invest these texts with just one meaning. (my italics) Her final conclusion takes us to the heart of the purpose of this small book, which is to try to see the Psalms – treasured by some, forbidding to others, ignored by many – afresh. And so to discover in these ancient texts hope for our time.

However much one can know about the original purpose of these texts (and as we have seen, in most cases this is now admitted to be very little), a really important issue is what the text means for the reader today – and this, of course, may be very different from what it meant for the reader some decades (or we may add centuries), ago.2

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Life in the Psalms

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