“[The Lord] put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.”
Psalm 40:3
A few years ago, I participated in a nine-month Ignatian retreat called The Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life. We met on a Saturday once a month at St. Joseph’s Catholic church, a Jesuit parish on Capitol Hill in Seattle. At the first session, while we were milling around before the program started, I was approached by one of the spiritual directors who was part of the leadership for the retreat. He extended his hand and said, “Hi, my name is John, are you David?” I replied, “Yes, but how did you know?” And he responded, “You’re carrying a Bible. I’m the person assigned to be your spiritual director. I read your application in advance of today’s retreat and figured the guy with the Bible must be the Presbyterian minister I read about.”
We both chuckled at the obvious cliché or gross generalization represented in the remark. Protestants bring their Bibles to Church and Catholics don’t. And a Presbyterian minister’s Bible has somehow become permanently affixed to its owner.
At the risk of sounding painfully pious, the generalization is pretty much true for me. Even when I go on vacation, my Bible is always one of the literary companions that I pack for the trip. The big reason for this can be found in the middle of the book. A collection of 150 prayers, organized under the heading “The Psalms”, is a part of the way I start most days.
If my Bible had an electronic tabulation of most frequently visited sites, the Psalms would be the winner. The older I get the truer this has become. As much as I love reading other parts of the Scriptures, I keep getting drawn back to the Psalms. This is mainly because they don’t just tell me something about God, they give me words to pray back to God. They tell me the truth that it is ok to be honest with God. They remind me that my affections don’t need to be run through a censor’s filter before I let them hit the ears of God. The Psalms are, as Calvin put it, “an anatomy of all parts of the soul.”
So when I am between sermon series on Paul’s letters, or Jesus’ parables, or the prophet’s oracles, I usually return to the Psalms. When I don’t have the energy to “study” the scriptures, I just join my voice with the voices of the saints that have gone before me and sing the songs they have taught me. I let them speak for me. And I never cease to be amazed by how much permission they give me to just be who I am and feel what I feel in the presence of God. I never cease to be emboldened by the risks the psalmists take with God. I never cease to be impressed by the trust these poets put in God. So, I get in their wake and let them pull me along into that stream of faithfulness.
I don’t study the Psalms so much as just I spend time with them and look for places of resonance within them. I land on words that speak to my situation and articulate my affections and ask my questions. The Psalms help me navigate a relationship with God rather than just tell me things about God. They don’t help me to assemble a theology of things that I should believe about God, as much as they point me in the direction of what it looks like and feels like to have a conversation with God. The Psalms are a kind of social lubricant that help me to engage and connect with God.
So, if I have prescription that I write for parishioners who come to me for spiritual guidance it usually has roots in the Psalms. Read the Psalms. Pray them back to God. Let them be your answer to God’s invitation to relationship. Let them be both the very old and always new song that God puts in our mouths.
David Rohrer
06/23/2022