Returning to the Psalms
After a 6 month hiatus, I’m excited to be back on Twitter and Substack with my close and not-so-close online friends. I have some fun writing projects, particularly an ongoing story I’ve been making for my kids, that I’m excited to share with you, in addition to getting back to posting a new poem on weekends. First, I want to share a bit of my experience with a habit I’ve developed while being less online: praying the entire book of psalms every week. I will likely be writing a few posts on passages from the psalms I find especially striking or unusual, but for now I want to talk about how I came to this devotion.
8 or 9 years ago (I remember because it was when my second daughter was still a baby) I was trying to make good use of a 45 minute bus ride to and from work and began reading the psalms daily. Years earlier, as a new convert, I had tried praying first the modern Liturgy of the Hours then later the 1961 Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Whatever one might argue for or against either approach to the Hours, I found I had a desire to say the whole psalter and was not satisfied with only getting fragments through the minor hours or saying the same few psalms daily in the Little Office. As I had a bit of down time on the bus, I resolved to read 5 psalms a day before reading anything for pleasure or learning, more or less allowing me to say the entire book once a month.
Most people I meet who pray part of the Office value it for its connection to the liturgical calendar. My experience is perhaps less common: once I gave up saying the psalms according to a calendar and instead began going through the entire book at my own pace I found a whole world opened up for me.
In part this experience is grounded in faith in the inspiration of scripture: here are the words the heavenly Spirit has given us to pray, to train the dispositions of our hearts to be more as they should be during prayer. In part I found there was a cleansing of the passions from moving through the full range of human feeling— joy and despair, innocence and contrition, persecution and triumph— presented in the psalms. I also found it made my extemporaneous prayer more lively as many images and phrases from the psalms became embedded in my memory. Lastly, I found it changed how I read through the rest of scripture. The longer narrative psalms recounting the history of Israel gave me a more living connection to that past as something with a concrete relation to my own life, and the messianic reading of the psalms gave me a more vital sense of the unity of the Old and New Testaments.
Now I read the psalms, time allowing, through saying Matins and Vespers according to the Byzantine tradition in which the entire book is broken down into 20 readings divided in these major Hours over the course of the week. When I don’t have time for this, I read the psalms on their own when convenient at another time of the day.
If you have never tried praying the whole book of psalms before, you don’t need to set aside massive amounts of time to try it out. You can begin with 5 psalms a day to pray it in a month without any special liturgical rule. You can look up the divisions of the Byzantine Kathisma and do one reading a day to go through the book roughly every 3 weeks. You could also purchase the book of Psalms from TAN that is arranged on a weekly cycle following the Roman Office. I have found it is not nearly as daunting as I expected, and is much more rewarding than stacking up many small pious devotions during the day.