The Psalms Speak

Certainly the psalms have spoken to many people in the twenty-four hundred years or so since they passed from oral to written tradition. The psalms still speak, but can we hear them? Our culture is decidedly not God-centered. Biblical illiteracy is commonplace in the contemporary world, especially among the educated. Whatever the mistrust or neglect, prayer and meditation can help a true seeker find a way back to the psalms, to history, and perhaps even to a spiritual home.

We readers mostly race through masses of printed material seeking the information needed for us to cope in our world. To read the psalms, one may try a more meditative reading, looking not for facts, but allowing the wisdom of the ages into our living experience. To allow this wisdom its space in our lives is not easy and takes time. Worshipful reading is a probing of the depths of consciousness best done in silence.

The psalms, for me, sing of the wisdom of lived experience. In these songs, the soul knows and is known by God, surviving the pain of suffering and the gloom of grief, risking honest hate and anger and making penance, seeking refuge from fears, learning to befriend the creation of which it is a part and finally coming to rest in the love of God, singing praises.