Topic 33 of 33 - Your Place in the Learning Journey
The Psalms as Literature and Prayer
The Psalms are the most quoted Old Testament book in the New Testament, the backbone of Jewish liturgy for two millennia, and the foundation of Christian worship in every tradition. They have also been recognized as great literature by readers with no religious commitment - as expressions of human experience at its extremes of joy, grief, rage, trust, and wonder that have few equals in any literary tradition. That these two things - literary greatness and liturgical function - should coincide in the same texts is not surprising. The Psalms are great literature because they are doing the most demanding thing literature can do: they are finding language for the encounter between human beings and the ultimately real.
The Psalms are a collection of 150 poems assembled over several centuries for use in Israel's temple worship. They represent multiple authorial voices and multiple liturgical settings. The psalms of ascent (120-134) were sung by pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem. The hallel psalms (113-118) were sung at Passover. The lament psalms - the largest category - were used by individuals and communities expressing their distress to God. Understanding this diversity of genre and liturgical setting is the first step toward reading any specific psalm well.
The lament psalms deserve particular attention because they are the most frequently overlooked and the most valuable. Psalms 22, 44, 88, and others begin in a place of genuine darkness - abandonment, persecution, the silence of God, the approach of death - and they address that darkness directly to God. They do not sanitize the experience of suffering. Psalm 88 ends with no resolution, only darkness. Psalm 22 begins with the cry that Jesus quoted from the cross. The canonical inclusion of these psalms is a permanent statement that this kind of prayer - the prayer of honest desperation - is legitimate and even normative within the community of faith.
Reading the Psalms well involves reading them slowly, attending to the images, following the emotional movement within each psalm, and noticing the turn - the moment when a psalm pivots from complaint to confidence, from darkness to light, from petition to praise. Not every psalm makes that turn - some stay in the darkness, which is its own form of honesty. But many do, and the turn is rarely a resolution of the problem that prompted the lament. It is a reorientation of the speaker toward the God who is present even in the darkness - not because the darkness has been explained but because God has been encountered within it.