Re-membering It Forward, part 4: Praying the Psalms
(This blog series explores re-membering as a way to ground us wholly in the Holy. This blog explores how praying the Psalms help us to re-member.)
Praying the Psalms re-members us to God, ourselves, one another, and all of Creation, because it provides a framework for all of our emotions and experiences, especially those feelings associated with danger, disaster, disappointment, discouragement, and fear.
Poetry creates spaces for feelings, thoughts and emotions in ways that prose often fails to do. For some events in life – joy or sorrow – words struggle to name something directly, and so poetry does the work of framing the experience or giving voice to things felt too deeply for words. The Psalms, as a collection of prayers, poems and songs written over the course of hundreds of years, allow us to encounter all of life’s circumstances honestly – even if obliquely.
Have you ever had a song express your feelings better than you could describe it to someone? Maybe you wanted to turn it up because it helped express your joy, Or maybe you played it on repeat 100 times because it helped you through the pain…
Praying the Psalms re-members us to God, because when we pray them we align our stories with God’s story. Christians are not different humans who experience different circumstances from other people in this world. The Psalms provide a way for us to express and live through all of life’s moments – joy, pain, sorrow, birth, death, etc. This proves especially true in moments of grief when we become unmoored and uncertain about next moments and next steps. The framework of the Psalms reminds us we are not alone. In her book, Wondrous Depth, Ellen Davis comments, “we are always in the company of other readers, with Christians in multiple generations before us.” (p.xiii) In praying the Psalms we re-member ourselves to others, because we join our voices and prayers to those across the centuries who have prayed – and who will pray – these words.
The Psalms re-member us to each other when we pray them for ourselves and for others. Davis says it this way, “The Psalm read at any particular service may or may not match our personal moods, and that is hardly the point. We are articulating that word of God, not just for ourselves individually, but for the whole body of Christ.” (p.19).
When we pray the Psalms for others – on behalf of others – we are acknowledging that somewhere, people may be experiencing what is happening in this Psalm, and it may seem so overwhelming to them that they cannot find voice on their own. They need us to pray it on their behalf.
Have you ever had someone say what you were wanting to say yet struggled to find the words or the voice to express them? We can do that for others.
Also, praying the psalms for others provides a reflection into our own lives. Davis says it this way: “Psalm speaks differently to those who exercise power or have privilege. In order to address the Psalms faithfully, we also must “turn it 180 degrees” to see if someone can be praying this prayer to God about us.” (p.23) When we pray the lament Psalms on behalf of others, we open ourselves to the reality of how we might be the ones causing the miserable circumstances that illicit these prayers.
While the psalms provide a framework for the spectrum of human experiences along life’s journey, the editors of the Book of Psalms formed the book itself as a framework for the lives of those who follow after God by bookending it with Psalms 1 and 150.
On one side is Psalm 1, and Dr. Davis invites modern readers to imagine a world in which Psalm 1 is even possible. The people living in an arid, desert climate hear the words that the one who follows after God’s ways will be like a tree planted by the waters… in their minds they might have heard, “Oasis.” An oasis to nomadic people groups of the desert signified life and restoration – water, shade, and plenty.
I wonder if you have ever considered your life as water to parched souls…
How can your life offer a possibility of hope to someone amidst our culture’s narrative of fear and scarcity?
Psalm 150 bookends the Book of Psalms on the other end. Praying, singing, and meditating on this Psalm re-members us to God’s grand story, because in it we see that everything ends in praise. This does not mean that bad things do not happen in life. This psalm reminds us that these things are not the end of the story. A cousin once told me, “If it’s bad, it’s not the end.” While some things seem like endings – awful endings, even – they may be the end of a chapter, yet they are not the end of the whole story in which our stories are caught up in God’s grand story of hope and redemption and re-membering us to those we love and the One who loves us.
Psalm 150 layers praise, and it crescendos with “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!” Sunday Service Choir sings a song that captures this for me. While they have their inspiration from Revelation 19, the way they sing it gives me glimpse of how Psalm 150 might have sounded thousands of years ago. I placed it below if you’re interested in hearing crescendoing praise.
Become a part of something great. Participate in something timeless and meaningful. Read some psalms this week, and as you do, imagine you are praying them with a multitude around you – because you are.
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