Transformation Begins with Honesty

The Psalms help us be real! In Honesty That Heals, a sermon preached on January 15, 2006, we look at Psalm 77 as a model of that journey from rage to reflection to rejoicing that is part of praying the Psalms (and other scriptures of course.) Those who appreciate Kathleen Norris' Cloister Walk, will enjoy the additional quotes below that were not included in the sermon.

I also quote Eugene Peterson. His book Answering God is all about the extensive use of the Psalms in spiritual formation; an incredible book on understanding both prayer and the Psalms.

Kathleen Norris from Cloister Walk:
You come to the Bible’s great “book of praises” through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you may feel like the pits, you sing anyway. To your surprise, you find that the Psalms do not deny your true feelings but allow you to reflect on them, right in front of God and everyone.
The world the Psalms depict is not that different from our own; the 4th century monk Athanasius wrote that the Psalms “become like a mirror to the person singing them,” and this is true now too.
They remind us that the mundane and the holy are linked.
The Psalms make us uncomfortable because they don’t let us deny - either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation into praise.
We commit ourselves to being changed by the Psalms, allowing the words to work on us, and sometimes to work us over.
The Psalms are unrelenting in their realism. They ask us to consider our true situation and to pray over it. They ask us to be honest about ourselves. (p. 104)

From Norris' Quotidian Mysteries:
(Early woman monastic Syncletica) “There is a grief that is useful, and there is a grief that is destructive. The first sort consists in weeping over one’s faults and weeping over the weakness of you neighbor…..but there is also a grief that comes from the enemy, full of mockery, which some call acedia (spiritual depression/ listlessness; not bearing the thought of going on). This spirit must be cast out, mainly by prayer and psalmody (praying the Psalms as a spiritual exercise)

More from Cloister Walk:
People who rub up against the psalms every day come to see that, while children may praise spontaneously, it can take a lifetime for adults to recover this ability. One sister told me that when she first entered the convent as an idealistic young woman, she had tried to pretend that "praise was enough." It did not last long. The earthy honesty of the psalms had helped her, she says, to "get real, get past the holy talk and the romantic image of the nun." In expressing all the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the psalms act as good psychologists. They defeat our tendency to try to be holy without being human first. Psalm 6 mirrors the way in which our grief and anger are inextricably mixed; the lament that "I am exhausted with my groaning; / every night I drench my pillow with tears" (v. 6) soon leads to rage: "I have grown old surrounded by my foes. / Leave me, you who do evil" (vv. 7-8). Psalm 38 stands on the precipice of depression, as wave after wave of bitter self-accusation crashes against the small voice of hope. The psalm is clinically accurate in its portrayal of extreme melancholia: "the very light has gone from my eyes" (v. 10), "my pain is always before me" (v. 17), and its praise is found only in the possibility of hope: "It is for you, O Lord, that I wait" (v. 15). Psalm 88 is one of the few that ends without even this much praise. It takes us to the heart of pain and leaves us there, saying, "My one companion is darkness" (v. 18). We can only hope that this darkness is a friend, one who provides a place in which our deepest wounds can heal.
The psalms make us uncomfortable because they don't allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation into praise. As a Benedictine sister in her fifties, having recently come from both the loss of a job and the disintegration of a long-term friendship, put it to me, "I feel as if God is rebuilding me, 'binding up my wounds' " [Ps. 147:3]. "But," she adds, "I'm tired, and little pieces of the psalms are all I can handle. Once you've fallen apart, you take what nourishment you can. The psalms feel like a gentle spring rain: you hardly know that it's sinking in, but something good happens."
The psalms reveal our most difficult conflicts and our deep desire to run from the shadow. In them, the shadow speaks to us directly, in words that are painful to hear. In recent years, some Benedictine houses, particularly women's communities, have begun censoring the harshest of the psalms, often called the "cursing psalms," from their public worship. But one sister, a liturgist, said after visiting such a community, "I began to get antsy, feeling, something is not right. The human experience is of violence, and the psalms reflect our experience of the world."
The psalms are full of shadows--enemies, stark images of betrayal: "Even my friend, in whom I trusted, / who ate my bread, has turned against me" (Ps. 41:9). Psalm 10 contains an image of a lion who "lurks in hiding" (10:9) that calls to my mind the sort of manipulative people whose true colors come out only behind the doors of their "lairs." Psalm 5 pictures flatterers, "their throat a wide-open grave, all honey their speech" (v. 9). As C. S. Lewis has noted in Reflections on the Psalms, when the psalms speak to us of lying and deceit, "no historical readjustment is required. We are in the world we know."

Bonhoeffer quotes: Psalms, Prayerbook of the Bible

The first sermon in the teaching series is called. Seek His Face Continually. It can be downloaded and listened to at the Christ Church sermon archives page. In it, I make extensive references to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's amazing last book, Psalms, Prayer Book of the Bible. It is a rich source of inspiration for us to be immersed in the Psalms. These exerpts are adapted from the introduction to the new edition of Bonhoeffer's works.


The Nazi Board for the regulation of Literature fined and chastised B for publishing the book as subversive. Removed the fine but banned all future publications. (imprisoned and executed before he could!) Anything lifting up the Old Test. Or the Old Testament people of God – the Jews was out. It was in the context of the German church struggle (main church sold its soul to the Nazis)

That B desired to retrieve the Psalms as the prayer book of Jesus. Interpreted the Ps as did Luther seeing Christ in them and speaking in them as well as the source of His own prayers (Marty).
He saw it as side by side with the Lord’s prayer as the Lord’s answer to the plea of the Disciples, “Teach us to pray!” The LP can be seen as the lens through which we read the Psalms. We pray with Jesus in the Psalms.

Praying certainly does not mean simply pouring out one’s heart. It means, rather, finding the way to and speaking with God, whether the heart is full or empty. No one can do that on one’s own. For that one needs Jesus Christ.

We learn to pray like a child learns to speak – saying the parent’s words after them. So prayer is answering God

Reading the Psalms in worship services; (learned in the Benedictine Monastery experience) having systematic ways of reading the Psalms are a profound help in forming an independent relationship with God and with God’s Word.

Psalms should be prayed in their entirety since they “mirror life with all its ups and downs, its passions, and discouragements.”

Luther: “Whoever has begun to pray the Psalter earnestly and regularly, will soon take leave of those other , easy, little prayers of their own and say: ‘Au, there is not the juice, the strength, the passion, the fire which I find in the Psalter.’”

B. loved to pray the Psalms because they offered him the sustaining and liberating power of God’s own words in coping with the vicissitudes of everyday living. The praying of the Psalms also teaches us to pray as a community.

Letter to parents when imprisoned: “I read the Psalms every day, as I have done for years; I know them and love them more than any other book.” Psa 31:15 My times are in your hands…rescue me
Psa 13, How long O Lord…
The source of B’s vitality and stamina in prison = “his constant , daily, childlike relationship to God.” (Burton Nelson) He would learn scripture during the day and review it before sleep…wake up at 6 and read Psalms and hymns.

The prison doc who attended his execution wrote, “I was most deeply moved by the way this extraordinary, lovable man prayed, so resigned and so certain that God heard his prayer.”

Daily use:. Every day we should read and pray several Psalms, if possible with others, so that we read through this book repeatedly during the year and continue to delve into it ever more deeply.

The church father Jerome says that in his time one could hear the Psalms being sung in the fields and gardens. The Psalms filled the life of early Christianity. Its recovery will be powerful for the church.

Adapted from Fortress Press ed. Of the complete works of Bonhoeffer

January Series at Christ Church

Most addictions don't involve things to pursue. This is an "addiction" I want! A spiritual habit that dominates my life in a transforming way. January 8 begins a teaching mini-series on the Psalms. We'll talk about what many throughout history have called Psalmody - the practice of habitually reading and praying the Psalms. Each week we'll teach on one of the Psalms that powerfully illustrate this practical spiritual discipline.

Look at this blog as a teaching tool to go deeper. Visit the blog for links to helpful websites, discussions that apply what is being taught and read, meditations on other Psalms, resources, etc.

The Importance of the Psalms

The Psalms give us a language for our prayers. Here are two quotes from a Benedictine website. These are monks, you say. Then sign me up to be a Postmodern monastic!

"The book of psalms is like a garden which contains the fruits of all the other books of scripture, both Old and New Testaments. The crop it grows is their fruit, which it produces as music, while adding other fruits of its own. It seems to me also that the psalms are like a mirror. Anyone who recites them sees himself, and all the movements of his own heart and mind. He is deeply affected, because he encounters there as it were his own words, and his own songs, only given clearer expression than he could ever have managed himself."
(From the Letter to Marcellinus of St. Athanasius, 295-373, author of the Life of Antony)

"How sweet it is to read the psalms! It is not tiresome, but most delightful. What could I do that would please me more? In the psalms I praise and glorify my Creator; I invoke, honour and entreat Him; in the psalms I thank Him and bless Him; in the psalms I confess my sins and implore mercy; in the psalms I consider the vanity of the world, and I understand the frailty of life, the paltry value of this mortal body, and the danger of being carried far from God. Above all in the psalms I glimpse, in so far as the countless defects of my eyes permit, the infinite power, wisdom, and goodness of God. I find in the psalms such exact prophecies of Jesus Christ that I could believe some of them were composed after, rather than before, His death. I love to sing the psalms by heart so that I can pray them without effort, unhindered by illness or any other obstacle. Does not David deserve our admiration for giving us such exquisite poetry, such noble philosophy, such tender feeling, as of a man enamoured of heavenly beauty! A love of the psalms is the mark of a true monk. Woe to those who scorn them! We may well doubt whether any spiritual exercise can please someone who is bored by the psalter. So suited is psalmody to monks that in former times when they made their profession they used to be urged to keep the psalms always in their hands or on their lips. For what could be more useful for us, whose desire it is to pray at all times, to meditate frequently, and sometimes even to attain heavenly contemplation? If the main concern of monks is to bemoan their sins, to praise God for His infinite mercy, and with hearts overflowing with love, to cling to Jesus as He hangs naked on the Cross, then no physical or spiritual occupation could offer them greater satisfaction than the recitation of the psalter."
(Paul Giustiniani OSB, 1476-1528)