The Cloister Walk (15 page)

Adults can be hypersensitive about admitting to offensive emotions, and children sometimes are more able to allow for the hyperbole of the psalms. I once assigned Psalm 109 in a class I was teaching, and one woman ended up reading it to her nine-year-old granddaughter, after she'd encountered her in tears. It was a hot afternoon, and the girl had ridden her bike over a mile along a dusty trail to the neighborhood swimming pool, hoping to cool off. But she arrived just as the staff was closing it, and one officious youth was short with her. Her grandmother explained that she had to study a poem about being angry, and it might help to read it aloud. But soon after she'd entered the catalogue of curses—“Let their children be wanderers and beggars / driven from the ruins of their home. / Let creditors seize all their goods . . .” (vv. 10-11)—the child cried out, “Oh, stop! Stop! He's just a college kid!”

The daily praying of the psalms helps monastic people to live with them in a balanced and realistic way, appreciating their hyperbole without taking it as prescriptive. Benedictines become so close to the psalms that they become, as more than one sister told me, “like a heartbeat.” The psalms do become a part of a Benedictine's physical as well as spiritual life, acting on the heart to slow it down, something I came to know as I often came to noon prayer with my mind still racing with the work I'd interrupted. Beginning to recite a psalm such as 62, which begins: “In God alone is my soul at rest,” I'd feel as if I were skidding to a halt. Like many of the psalms, it laments human falsity, those who “with their mouth . . . utter blessing / but in their heart they curse” (v. 4). But the next line: “In God alone
be
at rest, my soul,” offers not only a pleasurable poetic repetition but a shift from pain into hope, a widening of horizons that is not only sound but comforting.

But daily exposure to the psalms also makes it possible to become numb to them, to read even the most stunning poetry (“By God's word the heavens were made, / by the breath of God's mouth all the stars” [Ps. 33:6]) in such a way that you scarcely notice what you've said. But what often happens is that holiness reasserts itself so that even familiar psalms suddenly infuse the events of one's life with new meaning. One sister told me that as she prayed the psalms aloud at the bedside of her dying mother, who was in a coma, she discovered “how perfectly the psalms reflected my own inner chaos: my fear of losing her, or of not losing her and seeing her suffer more, of saying goodbye, of being motherless.” She found that the closing lines of Psalm 16—“You will show me the path of life, / the fullness of joy in your presence”—consoled her “as I saw my mother slipping away. I was able to turn her life over to God.”

Internalizing the psalms in this way allows contemporary Benedictines to find personal relevance in this ancient poetry. Paradoxically it also frees them from the tyranny of individual experience. To say or sing the psalms aloud within a community is to recover religion as an oral tradition, restoring to our mouths words that have been snatched from our tongues and relegated to the page, words that have been privatized and effectively silenced. It counters our tendency to see individual experience as sufficient for formulating a vision of the world.

The liturgy that Benedictines have been experimenting with for fifteen-hundred-plus years taught me the value of tradition; I came to see that the psalms are holy in part because they are so well-used. If so many generations had found solace here, might I also? The holiness of the psalms came to seem like that of a stone that has been held in the palm by countless ancestors, illustrating the difference between what the poet Galway Kinnell has termed the “merely personal,” or individual, and the “truly personal,” which is individual experience reflected back into community and tradition. That great scholar of mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, makes the same distinction when speaking of prayer, admitting that “devotion by itself has little value . . . and may even be a form of self-indulgence,” unless it is accompanied by a transformation of the personal. “The spiritual life of individuals,” she writes, “has to be extended both vertically to God and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore the more truly personal it will be.”

Recent scholarship regards the psalms as liturgical poems that were used in ancient Israel's communal worship. Even individual laments such as Psalm 51, it is believed, were incorporated into a public worship setting. But praying the psalms is often disconcerting for contemporary people who encounter Benedictine life: raised in a culture that idolizes individual experience, they find it difficult to recite a lament when they're in a good mood, or to sing a hymn of praise when they're in pain.

The communal recitation of the psalms works against this form of narcissism, the tendency in America to insist that everything be self-discovery. One soon finds that a strength of the monastic choir is that it always contains someone ready to lament over a lifetime of days of “emptiness and pain” (Ps. 70:10) or to shout with a joy loud enough to make “the rivers clap their hands” (Ps. 98:8). Though, as one sister says, “we're so different I sometimes think we live in different universes, the liturgy brings us back to what's in the heart. And the psalms are always instructing the heart.” This is not a facile remark. The vow of “conversion of life,” which is unique to Benedictines, means that you commit yourself to being changed by the words of the psalms, allowing them to work on you, and sometimes to work you over.

A cursing psalm such as 52: “You love lies more than truth . . . you love the destructive word” (v. 3) might occasion self-recrimination, demanding that we pray it for someone who is angry with us, and also reflect on just how justified that person might be in leveling such an accusation against us. Psalm 22, which moves dramatically from pain (“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”[v. 1]) to prophetic praise (“All the earth shall remember and return to the Lord . . .” [v. 27]), might pose a challenge to the rational mind. What if there is no one to hear such a prayer? What if one is simply too exhausted by despair to pray it? Herein lies the gift of communal worship. “In the really hard times,” says one sister, “when it's all I can do to keep breathing, it's still important for me to go to choir. I feel as if the others are keeping my faith for me, pulling me along.”

It helps that the psalms themselves keep moving. In a monastic choir they inevitably pull a person out of private prayer, into community and then into the world, into what might be termed praying the news. Psalm 74's lament on the violation of sacred space: “Every cave in the land is a place where violence has made its home” (v. 20) has become for me a prayer for the victims and perpetrators of domestic violence. Watching television footage of the Los Angeles riots of early 1992 gave me a new context for the words of Psalm 55 that I encountered the next morning in the monastic choir: “I see nothing but violence and strife in the city” (v. 9). Hearing Psalm 79 (“They have poured out water like blood in Jerusalem / there is no one left to bury the dead” [v. 3]) as I read of civil war in the Balkans forces me to reflect on the evil that tribalism and violence, often justified by religion, continue to inflict on our world.

But the relentless realism of the psalms is not depressing in the way that television news can be, although many of the same events are reported: massacres, injustices to those who have no one to defend them, people tried in public by malicious tongues. As a book of praises, meant to be sung, the Psalter contains a hope that “human interest” stories tacked on to the end of a news broadcast cannot provide. The psalms mirror our world but do not allow us to become voyeurs. In a nation unwilling to look at its own violence, they force us to recognize our part in it. They make us re-examine our values.

When we want to “feel good about ourselves” (which I have heard seriously proposed as the purpose of worship), when we've gone to the trouble to “get a life,” current slang suggesting that life itself is a commodity, how can we say, with the psalmist, “I am poor and needy” (Ps. 40:17) or “my life is but a breath” (Ps. 39:5)? It seems so damned negative, even if it's true. How can we read Psalm 137, one of the most troubling of the psalms and also one of the most beautiful? The ultimate song of exile, it begins: “By the waters of Babylon / there we sat and wept, / remembering Zion.”

In a line that expresses the bitterness of colonized people everywhere, the psalmist continues:

These lines have a special poignancy for women: All too often, for reasons of gender, as well as poverty and race, we find that our journey from girlhood to womanhood is an exile to “alien soil.” And how do feminist women, who often feel as if we're asked to sing in the midst of an oppressive patriarchy, asked to dress pretty and act nice, read such a psalm? We may feel, as radical feminists do, that the very language we speak is an oppressor's tongue. How, then, do we sing?

If the psalm doesn't offer an answer, it allows us to dwell on the question. And as one encounters this psalm over and over again in Benedictine liturgy, it asks us to acknowledge that being uprooted and forced into servitude is not an experience alien to our “civilized” world. The speaker could be one of today's refugees or exiles, an illegal alien working in an American sweat shop for far less than the minimum wage, a slave laborer in China. When one reads the psalm with this in mind, the closing verse, containing an image of unspeakable violence against Israel's Babylonian captors, comes as no surprise: “O Babylon, destroyer, / he is happy who repays you the ills you brought on us. / He shall seize and shall dash / your children on the rock!” (vv. 8-9).

These lines are the fruit of human cruelty; they let us know the depth of the damage we do when we enslave other people, when we blithely consume the cheap products of cheap labor. But what does it mean to find such an image in a book of prayer, a hymn-book of “praises”? The psalms are unrelenting in their realism about the human psyche. They ask us to consider our true situation, and to pray over it. They ask us to be honest about ourselves and admit that we, too, harbor the capacity for vengeance. This psalm functions as a cautionary tale: such a desire, left unchecked, whether buried under “niceness” or violently acted out, can lead to a bitterness so consuming that even the innocent are not spared.

What the psalms offer us is the possibility of transformation, of converting a potentially deadly force such as vengeance into something better. What becomes clear when one begins to engage the psalms in a profound way—and the Benedictines insist that praying them communally, every day, is a good place to start—is that it can come to seem as if the psalms are reading and writing
us.
This concept comes from an ancient understanding, derived from the Hebrew word for praise,
tehilla,
that, in the words of the Benedictine Damasus Winzen, “comes from
hallal
which does not only mean ‘to praise' but primarily means ‘to radiate' or ‘to reflect. ' ” He states that “the medieval Jewish poet Jehuda Halevi expressed beautifully the spirit of the Psalter when he said: ‘Look on the glories of God, and awaken the glory in thee.' ”

I never felt particularly glorious at morning, noon, or evening prayer in my time with the Benedictines, but I did begin to sense that a rhythm of listening and response was being established between me and the world of the psalms. I felt as if I were becoming part of a living, lived-in poem, a relationship with God that revealed the holy not only in ordinary words but in the mundane events of life, both good and bad. As I was plunged into mysteries beyond my understanding—the God the psalmist has exhorted to speech (“O God, do not keep silence” [Ps. 83:1]) suddenly speaking in the voice of the
mysterium tremendum
(“from the womb before the dawn I begot you” [Ps. 110:3])—I recognized the truth of what one sister told me. She compared Benedictine liturgy to “falling in love, because you don't enter into it knowing the depths. It's a relationship you live with
until
you begin to understand it.”

In the dynamic of this liturgy one rides the psalms like a river current, noticing in passing how alien these ancient and sophisticated texts are, and how utterly accessible. When I encounter Psalm 61, which asks God to “set me on a rock too high for me to reach” (v. 2), I think of the dying ten-year-old girl in Robert Coles's
The Spiritual Life of Children,
who said as she slipped into a final coma, “I'd like to go to that high rock.” When I read Psalm 131 with its image of the soul as “a weaned child on its mother's breast” (v. 2), I remember the Benedictine sister retired from a university professorship on account of a delibitating illness who said, “For so many years, I was taught that I had to ‘master' subjects. But who can ‘master' beauty, or peace, or joy? This psalm speaks of the grace of childhood, not of being childish. One of my greatest freedoms is to see that all the pretenses and defenses I put up in the first part of my life, I can spend the rest of my life taking down. This psalm tells me that I'm a dependent person, and that it's not demeaning.”

There is much beauty in the psalms to stir up childlike wonder: the God who made whales to play with, who calls the stars by name, who asks us to drink from the stream of delight. Though as adults we want answers, we will sometimes settle for poetry and begin to see how it is possible to say, “My soul sings psalms to God unceasingly (Ps. 30:12), even if that means, in the words of one Benedictine nun, “I pray best in the dentist's chair.”