TEACH US TO PRAY
The psalms as necessary training ground
The day I learned I had breast cancer, I didn’t change my nightly ritual of praying a psalm. That night it was Psalm 118 [1]. I was comforted by the repetition in the first verses, “his steadfast love endures forever,” and the confident faith claim of the psalmist, “I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord” (v7). A few months later, as I lay in hospital with a severe reaction to chemotherapy, I alternately prayed the first verses of Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why have you forgotten me,”) and Psalm 23 (“The LORD is my shepherd”). I didn’t pray in defiance or anger or depression but out of a habit of Psalm praying. I was held by a vast resource of prayers that I’d learned to pray daily, the 150 prayers God’s people having been praying and singing and making their own for millennia.
When the coronavirus began taking its global toll and governments responded with measures to contain it, the Psalms again gave me words to pray my thoughts and feelings. I don’t pray psalms merely to see me through difficult times. Psalms aren’t a magic wand to wave over life’s hardships and ‘poof,’ all will be well. And neither do I pray psalms that suit my mood, be that happy or sad. I pray them daily because the psalms aren’t optional, they’re necessary prayers. That may sound an extravagant claim to make of one book in the Bible, but I learned it from Eugene Peterson in his book, Answering God. The Psalms are necessary, he says, not for salvation, but for prayer (1989, p. 3). In short, they teach us how to pray. And we need teaching.
Almost every Christian I’ve met agrees that prayer is the Christian’s most important spiritual discipline, while also confessing it’s a discipline with which they struggle the most. We all could use a little training in the life of prayer, and that’s where the Psalter, Israel’s daily prayer book, can help. Peterson describes the Psalms as “God’s gift to train us in prayer that is comprehensive and honest.” Each psalm, he adds, is a prayer, “answering the God who has addressed us,” (1989, pp. 3 and 5). The address from God comes in many forms—an accident, a surprise, a joy, a word, a pandemic gone viral; each psalm is a response to a real life situation.
My disciplined practice of praying the Psalms has taught me more about prayer and the life of prayer [think, the spiritual life], than anything else. The lessons I learned have made me realize that the Psalms are necessary for the ongoing life of the Christian.
Before I highlight the lessons I’ve learned, a word about who wrote the psalms. The quick answer to that question is we don’t know. About two-thirds of the psalms include a name—of David; of Asaph, etc., and we’ve assumed this meant author. But that isn’t necessarily the case. ‘Of’ could mean author or owner or the intended recipient of the psalm. We may not know who wrote a psalm, but we do know that the 150 psalms were compiled into a prayer book for all the people of Israel. This means that the psalms are for the people of God and were prayed with the community and not alone in isolation, even though the pronoun is often first person singular. Because the authorship is unknown, because these are community prayers, and for the sake of inclusivity of all peoples, I will alternate pronouns, between feminine, masculine or plural.
LESSONS ABOUT PRAYER
This isn’t an exhaustive list of lesson I’ve learned, but some of the most meaningful for me.
1. We don’t need to dress in our best
When I was a child I dressed up in my best to attend a church service. It rubbed off and I assumed God expected me to ‘dress in my best’ when I prayed. I mean, I thought when I came into God’s presence, I must show God positive feelings and thoughts (my best), and hide the negative ones. I wasn’t deliberately trying to deceive God, I just believed God wanted to see me at my best. As a result, my prayers were more like the hypocritical Pharisees Jesus rebuked, who “for the sake of appearance say long prayers” (Luke 20:47), than the brutal honesty of the psalmists; more like the Pharisee who prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people,” than the sinner who pleaded from a distance, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:11ff).
Praying the psalms revealed my hypocrisy. I had to change my mind and stop praying prayers that lacked integrity because they were for the sake of appearances. I thought positive thoughts and feelings would make others, including God think better of me. I kept my negative emotions such as anger, depression, and hatred unexpressed when I prayed. I lived in fear of punishment if I displayed anything but a positive attitude and happy feelings. I often struggled with anger, depression, hatred, disappointment, sadness, but could never admit those feelings to God. Instead, I pretended I was peaceful, happy and loving. Did I really think I was deceiving God? I don’t think so, even though I maintained the hypocrisy well into adulthood. To impress my faith community and out of fear of God’s judgment, I kept up the pretense of being what I thought was a good spiritual pray-er. Until I began daily praying the Psalms and was challenged to ‘undress’.
I discovered that the community who wrote and prayed these psalms cared little about flattering their religious egos by impressing others, were unconcerned about finding and expressing themselves, and never tried manipulating God to act according to their will. Their prayers are very unlike the typical extemporaneous, quickly uttered prayers with which I was familiar. The Psalms are different prayers because they are always a truthful, and thus a real response to God’s initiative. They possess what Peterson called an “angular austerity” (1989, p. 5), because they leave behind the polite, the civil, the politically correct. As I prayed the psalms I was forced to think, as Walter Brueggemann puts it, the unthinkable and utter the unutterable. Even worse, warns Brueggemann, “they lead us away from the comfortable religious claims of ‘modernity’ in which everything is managed and controlled” (1984, p. 53). Psalms move us into a world where God, and not the self, has absolute control. I could no longer attempt any deceptions. The Psalms prevented it. So, I quit dressing up in my best when I prayed.
2. We can pray the bad and the ugly, not just the good
Because the psalmists never dressed in their best, they also never practiced pretense. Their prayers express both pain and joy in passionate, poetic language, leaving us in no doubt about their true thoughts and feelings. They prayed all their emotions, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I used to be afraid to pray so passionately with them, until I finally realized that the Psalms are as much God’s words as Paul’s controlled prayers in the New Testament. Those who pray the psalms consistently discover God delights in their passion and graphic language. God never punished them for it. A wide range of emotions are poured out before the Lord, proving John Calvin right when he noted, “the Psalms are an ‘anatomy of the soul,’ fully articulating every facet of the cost and joy of life with God” [2]. Praying the Psalms is an emotional experience, sometimes disturbing and sometimes joyful. I learned to pray my emotions.
Praying the good
Praying the good (as in praise psalms) is common praying today. It’s what most of us are comfortable with. Thus, we mostly read the ‘happy’ (praise) psalms. We sing them in our ancient hymns and our contemporary praise songs. We share them with our friends when they’re in distress. There are plenty of praise psalms in the Psalter to pray, sing and share. Many of the praise psalms overflow with exuberant and loving praise. They are filled with passion, no doubt sung (and Israel sang their prayers) in uninhibited fashion.
This uninhibited emotion, I’ll confess was new to me. Not only did I hide my negative emotions, I also toned down the positive. My prayers were devoid of passion of any kind, until I prayed, and not merely quickly read, psalms like 145-150. These final six psalms are the only psalms in the Psalter that are pure praise to and about God. Psalms 146-150 begin and end with the Hebrew word halel, hallelujah or ‘praise the Lord’ in our English Bibles. The joy overflows, gathers momentum and crescendos in the finale as the pray-er shouts, “Let everything that breathes praise the LORD! Halel!” Faith in God’s presence and power to act lovingly in his world is ecstatic. All of creation is called to join in this joyful praise to God. These praise Psalms are ‘turn-up-the-music-and-get-up-and-dance’ kind of prayers. It’s challenging to remain seated while praying these psalms at the end of the Psalter. Of course, they’re not the only praise psalms. Praise weaves throughout the Psalter, coming to an ecstatic climax in these final psalms.
The bad and ugly: praying lament
We’re most familiar with the happy praise psalms because they’re the ones we most often turn to, even when our world is falling apart. But there are as many, if not more ‘bad and ugly’ psalms that we too often omit. Thanks to the psalms, I learned to bring the bad and ugly into God’s presence, and dared to utter the unutterable. We call these psalms lament, which simply means complaint. In these psalms, the lament, as N. T. Wright suggests, “is what happens when people ask, ‘Why?’ and don’t get an answer” [3]. They complain. Often. Like the psalmist who prayed, “Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan” (55:17). Three times a day he complained to God! So much for telling Christians they shouldn’t complain!
Laments are complaints to God about many things besides God’s failure to answer the pray-er’s questions. Often they complain about God’s seeming absence, or distance, or indifference, or unconcern. For instance, Psalm 13 begins: “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” It’s a lament that is repeated over and over in the Psalter. Because God remains distant the pray-er’s situation gets worse, her mood deteriorates and she complains. A variety of moods are expressed in these laments, including depression, anger, hatred and a desire for revenge on an enemy or oppressive injustice. The words used are graphic and even alarming, especially to us Westerners who’ve been schooled to be nice at all times to all people. Laments aren’t nice! They train us to name and own our true feelings and think unthinkable thoughts.
Psalm 88 taught me to own and pray my depression and despair. It’s a scary psalm to pray. It’s tone remains negative from the first stanza to the last line. There isn’t a single word of praise in it. The pray-er was in a pit, that kept getting deeper. She is in genuine pain and feels absolutely alone in the world. Her prayer expresses her despair as she waits for God who is slow to act and remains hidden. Because there’s no hope, she concludes with the depressing lament, “darkness is my only friend” (v18, NIV). Here is a painful complaint about the absence and silence of God. It echoes the opening line of Psalm 22, the one Jesus prayed from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Praying these psalms enabled me to admit that I too often experience God as absent and uncaring. It was a relief to confess that fact and find myself in good company, including the company of Jesus.
Anger is another emotion I suppressed as unspiritual, even sinful but that the psalms taught me to name and own. Many psalms, including ones attributed to David, express despair, anger and hatred and include instructions for God to deal harshly with the enemy who brought about the trial. In Psalm 69 the pray-er complains, “Insults have broken my heart, so that I am in despair” (v20). No one would pity or comfort him, and so he pleads, “Pour out your indignation upon them [his enemy], and let your burning anger overtake them” (v24). Worse, he gives God specific and cruel suggestions, “Let them be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous” (v28). The prayer is real, passionate and honest.
Psalm 109 expresses something akin to hatred. The psalmist prays that his enemy’s days be few, his wife a widow and his children orphans (vv8-9). This Psalm is described by Brueggemann as a “raw undisciplined song of hate and wish for vengeance by someone who has suffered deep hurt and humiliation” (1984, p. 83). The Hebrew exiles in Babylon express similar feelings for their captors in Psalm 137. They were depressed and angry about their exile and sang a mournful prayer to their God, complaining that they couldn’t (or maybe wouldn’t) sing the songs of Zion while in captivity and then suggest the unutterable: “Happy shall they be who take your [Babylonians’] little ones and dash them against a rock” (v9). This was prayer to God, prayed in his presence and with all the people of God. Psalmists may tell God what to do, but they never act out their own wishes, even when God ignores their suggestions. They tell God and then leave it with God, trusting God to act in God's own way.
When we consider Jesus’ commandment, “Love your enemies” (Mt 5:44), we may well wonder whether these psalms that express hatred are ones Christians can pray. Which is another lesson I learned.
3. We can utter the unutterable, think the unthinkable and speak it to God
In his commentary on the Psalms, Derek Kidner suggests that some lament psalms, especially the ones expressing hateful words, create “an embarrassing problem for the Christian, who is assured that all Scripture is inspired and profitable, but equally that he himself is to bless those who curse him.” He also suggests that the short answer to the question whether the Christian can use these hateful cries of vengeance “must surely be No” (1973, pp. 25-6 and 32). Perhaps he has a point, but they were preserved in the Book we call, The Word of God. Surely they’re meant to be uttered by the people of God who find themselves in distressing situations through unjust treatment? I believe there is room to pray the ‘embarrassing’ psalms for a number of reasons.
First, as I mentioned, they’re in our Holy Scripture. When the early church determined which books belonged in God’s Word, they didn’t take out the cries of vengeance and other politically incorrect and negative psalms. Therefore, we’re expected to read and pray them, even in this age of Jesus’ command to ‘love our enemies.’ You see, the cries for vengeance are indicative of pray-ers’ passion for justice. They knew God delights in, indeed loves justice (see Ps 37:28; 99:4). Their cry for vengeance was made to God and left with God. The pray-er trusted God to act justly and rightly. He never took matters into his own hands.
Second, lament psalms are included because the compilers of the Psalter believed that all of life, not just the comfortable and good belong within the domain and concern of the Almighty God and should be brought by us into God’s presence. Nothing, not even our hatred, is outside of God’s Sovereign Rule. Besides, God knows about it so we may as well admit it to ourselves in God’s presence. Walter Brueggemann notes, “The Psalms draw our entire life under the rule of God, where everything may be submitted to the God of the gospel” (1984, p. 15). This is indeed good news (gospel). The psalms are necessary to guide us about how to bring all of life to God.
Third, they keep us in touch with life as it really is. Life includes pain and suffering, health and well-being, joy and sorrow. As a spiritual director once taught me, life goes in a repetitive cycle of calm, disaster, rescue and joy. This is the cycle of the 150 psalms, taking us through, joy and sorrow, loss and well-being, praise and lament, from beginning to end. They give us a way to bring all of life into the presence of a loving God even when God seems distant.
Fourth, when we sing only the happy psalms, we’re in danger of living in denial of life as it really is. Walter Brueggemann warns, “The problem with a hymnody that focuses on equilibrium, coherence, and symmetry [think happy songs and prayers] is that it may deceive and cover over. Life is not like that. Life is also savagely marked by disequilibrium, incoherence, and unrelieved asymmetry” (1984, p. 51). Lament psalms give us permission to release our pent-up emotions in God’s presence, believing God can handle them. A God who can’t, isn’t a God I want.
Fifth, the psalms that express emotion in the raw assure us that God is bigger than our emotions. One day my five-year old nephew was mad at me for not letting him do something he wasn’t supposed to do. He yelled, “I hate you. I’m never going to play with you again,” and stormed out. Five minutes later he came back. His anger and hatred forgotten as he asked, “Jackie, will you come and play with me?” Of course I did. I was older and more mature than my five-year old nephew. His little temper tantrum didn’t alter my relationship with him. I let him get it out of his system and waited for him to come back. I knew he would. I just thought it would take longer than five minutes. So too God, who is so much greater than you or me, can handle our emotions. Sometimes I think God lets us behave like children because he knows we’ll be back wanting ‘to play,’ willing to submit once again to his sovereignty.
Finally, lament psalms are included in a book whose Hebrew title, tehillim, (‘psalms’ in English) means “praises or songs of praise.” There are as many, if not more lament psalms than praise psalms but they too are called ‘songs of praises’ because offering them to God is as much an act of praise and worship as singing our joyful praise songs. The psalmists didn’t believe, as many Christians seem to, that negativity is indicative of no faith, and therefore a sin. On the contrary, the psalms of darkness, far from being indicative of failure and disbelief, are acts of bold faith because they refuse to live life in pretense and they insist that all of life, the good and bad, should be brought to God for discourse [4]. They are a clear statement of faith in a God who is above us and in control and also one of us in loving relationship with us. Each Psalm is addressed to God, by one who boldly believes in God’s presence and willingness to act on their behalf, even though the felt experience of the pray-er is very different, as in Psalm 88. The pray-er often complains about the absence of God, but addresses her prayer to God, as though God were present. As I have boldly prayed and lamented with these psalmists, my faith has been deepened.
4. Know before Whom you stand
The psalmists were unafraid to be real in God’s presence and lament honestly because they had a good understanding of the God before whom they stood. I mean, they had good theology, which means that praying the psalms is a theological exercise. I know that many Christians don’t like to think of prayer and theology in the same space. Some Christians have told me that theology can be harmful and will lead us astray. Others believe it belongs in the halls of academia and is irrelevant for the average person seeking to live a good Christian life. Perhaps we’ve simply misunderstood the meaning of theology and therefore the importance of theology for our prayer life.
My favorite definition of theology comes from the 4th century saint, Evagrius of Pontus, who firmly believed that prayer and theology belong together. He wrote, “A theologian is one whose prayer is true.” There is no prayer without theology, and only bad theology where there is no prayer. The moment we address God in prayer, we’re doing theology! The psalmists always knew this. Even Jesus taught the importance of theology to prayer. When the disciples asked, “Lord, teach us to pray,” Jesus not only gave them a prayer to recite, he also taught them, through parables, about the God to whom they prayed (Luke 11:1-13). The Jewish Rabbi, Abraham Heschel insisted that “prayer cannot live in a theological vacuum. It comes out of insight.” Therefore, he urged, “When you pray, know before Whom you stand” (1996, p. 108). Because theology is about “people of faith using their minds to understand who God is and how he works” (Peterson, 1989, p. 13), it must be accompanied by prayer. Theology is the prayerful discipline of coming to know the Triune God more intimately and being transformed into God’s image. Theology, therefore, is a relational activity.
So too is prayer. In its broadest meaning, prayer is a lifestyle of growing in an intimate, loving relationship with the Triune God. In prayer we enter the presence of and communicate with the Triune God. Prayer is always an encounter with God. It is a response to God, who addressed us first. It is imperative that we know before Whom we stand. The reluctance of so many Christians today to be real in God’s presence, their fear of praying the psalms of ‘darkness,’ is, I believe, a result of bad theology. We don’t know the God to whom we pray and so we go to God the way we go to church, dressed in our best. This wasn’t true of the ancient Hebrews who prayed the psalms. They were free to be real in God’s presence, express life exactly as they experienced it, because they knew God was much bigger than anything they might bring to him. As Peterson observes, Psalms “were prayed by people who understood that God had everything to do with them. God, not their feelings, was the center” (1989, p. 14). They didn’t pray in order to express themselves. They prayed because they recognized that God had addressed them in their day to day life experiences.
Their theology is evident in the many terms used to address God and the variety of images used to describe God. Sometimes they use God’s name, YHWH, always translated in English Bibles as LORD, sometimes simply as God, but many times they use an image—refuge, strength, shepherd, guide, teacher, and so many more. Their prayers often include some of the creedal (belief) statements from Scripture. (Psalm 86, for instance, draws on the ancient truth about God found in Exodus 34:6-7. Other psalms recall God’s works done in the past, as Ps 77.) The psalms were prayed by a people who were passionate about their God and who knew the stories about God. Praying them will enrich your relationship with God and give you new forms of address and a deeper respect for the past activity of God.
HOW TO PRAY THE PSALMS
The Psalms will teach us how to pray so long as we pray them. But how? You may ask. There’s no right or wrong way to pray psalms. We each find our own way. I can only give suggestions to get you started.
1. Just keep at it
In one sense, it’s easy to pray the psalms. The words are in front of you and all you have to do is read them, as written. We all know how to do that. In another sense, it’s downright difficult. Praying through all 150 psalms requires discipline, a determination to keep showing up to prayerfully read the next psalm, whether it matches our mood, our circumstance or not. It’s not easy to pray the depressing lament of Psalm 88 when your mood is upbeat, more in tune with the joyous praise of Psalm 150. Praying a lament when we’re feeling upbeat is a chance to pray for someone in the world who needs that lament, praying in solidarity with a fellow believer. Sometimes the psalm gives us words to prayer for others. Kathleen Norris learned this and wrote, “Psalm 74’s lament on the violation of sacred space: ‘Every cave in the land is a place where violence has made its home’ (v20) has become for me a prayer for the victims and perpetrators of domestic violence” (1996, p. 102). The psalm might not express my life, but it expresses another’s, and I pray it for them. It’s also hard to pray an upbeat praise psalm when you’re in trying times (lockdown because of a pandemic) and would prefer a cry for vengeance or one of despair. We offer praise with and for those who are in a praise mood. Praise psalms also give us hope that we, in time, will get out of our pits. It takes discipline to just keep at it, but it’s not an impossible task.
2. Start at the very beginning and keep going to the end
When I began praying the psalms, no one taught me how. So, I began with Psalm 1 and made a slow journey through to 150. I’ve since learned that many saints, especially those who live together in religious communities that pray psalms multiple times a day, match a psalm with the time of day and even the season of the year. They jump back and forth rather than praying from beginning to end. I discovered a few benefits in my way of praying the psalms and so keep at it.
The Psalter is divided into five different books (you’ll see this in the Bible as a new book begins) but there is no logical reason why a psalm appears in a particular Book. They aren’t arranged historically, with all Davidic psalms in one book and post-Davidic in another. That would make sense. Neither are they arranged by type of psalm, with all joyful psalms in one book, depressing ones in another, cries for vengeance separated from psalms of confession and so on. Which would be nice, making it easier to find a psalm to suit our mood and experience. There’s no apparent ordering of the psalms. They’re all mixed up! For a reason.
There is a logical, albeit gradual progression through the book. It goes from mostly lament in the beginning to pure joyful praise at the end. The psalms of lament dominate the first three books, usually mixed in with some praise. Lament is less heard in book four and totally disappears by the time we reach Psalm 145 in book five. The Psalter, prayed from beginning to end, takes us through the life cycle of joy, sorrow, despair and back to joy, many times over. We keep repeating the pattern as we begin again with Psalm 1. Psalms assure us that, even though life always has pain, we’ll get past it to joy “in the morning.” As Peterson observed, the Psalms are “one hundred and fifty carefully crafted prayers that deal with the great variety of operations that God carries on in us and attend to all parts of our lives that are, at various times and in different ways, rebelling and trusting, hurting and praising” (1989, pp. 2-3). And we pray this cycle many times over when we begin at the beginning and keep going to the end. So begin today and pray Psalm 1, tomorrow pray Psalm 2, the next day, Psalm 3 and keep going to Psalm 150 and then begin all over again.
3. Don’t read more than you can handle
When you get started on praying the psalms, the most ancient and most common of biblical spiritual disciplines (even Jesus prayed the psalms), don’t take on more than you can handle. I mean, don’t attempt to read the entire psalm if it’s a long one. Fortunately, the Psalter begins with short psalms. The first long one is Psalm 18 (50 verses). When I began praying the psalms, I limited myself to 10-12 verses at a time. Thus, Psalm 18 took a few days. As I’ve grown and benefited from praying psalms, I have increased the amount I pray each night. There’s no formal rule. Pray as many verses as you can handle.
4. Choose a time and stick to it
There’s no right or wrong way to pray the psalms. There’s no right or wrong time of day to pray them. The Anglican/Episcopal Book of Common Prayer has a plan for praying the 150 Psalms in one month, praying three times a day. That’s not possible for most people. My favorite time is immediately before bed. I spend time reflecting on and journaling about the day and then pray the next psalm, or portion of one, on my list. Sometimes the psalm is exactly what I need, most often, it isn’t. Pick a time of day, mark it in your calendar and just stick to it. As I said, praying the Psalms, as with all praying, takes discipline.
Conclusion
As I pray the Psalter my life of prayer has been and continues to be slowly transformed. This discipline isn’t magic. The transformations have been neither quick in coming nor easy to come by. The task remains a discipline, constantly working against the inertia of my human nature, training my soul to be consistent and regular in this ancient Hebrew and Christian spiritual discipline, and practicing patient waiting over the long-haul. The transformations are only noticed as I look back over years of consistency, stubbornly persisting with the Psalter. Psalm praying remains my most consistent spiritual discipline; the one routine that I can continue when all other routines have been messed with. The claim that “the Psalms are necessary,” no longer seems extravagant to me. It is an experienced truth.
[1] Unless otherwise stated, all Scripture references are from the NRSV.
[2] Quoted in Brueggemann, Walter. The Message of the Psalms. 1984: 17.
[3] https://time.com/5808495/coronavirus-christianity/ Accessed 4/2/20.
[4] See Brueggemann, 1984, p. 52.
Works Cited
Brueggemann, Walter. The Message of the Psalms. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House. 1984.
Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Moral Granduer and Spiritual Audacity. Essays edited by Susannah Heschel.
New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1996.
Kidner, Derek. Psalms 1-72. Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press. 1973.
Norris, Kathleen. The Cloister Walk. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. 1996.
Peterson, Eugene. Answering God. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. 1989.
Jackie L. Smallbones, ThD. 2020©
You're welcome to copy this, but please contact me, the author first.
When the coronavirus began taking its global toll and governments responded with measures to contain it, the Psalms again gave me words to pray my thoughts and feelings. I don’t pray psalms merely to see me through difficult times. Psalms aren’t a magic wand to wave over life’s hardships and ‘poof,’ all will be well. And neither do I pray psalms that suit my mood, be that happy or sad. I pray them daily because the psalms aren’t optional, they’re necessary prayers. That may sound an extravagant claim to make of one book in the Bible, but I learned it from Eugene Peterson in his book, Answering God. The Psalms are necessary, he says, not for salvation, but for prayer (1989, p. 3). In short, they teach us how to pray. And we need teaching.
Almost every Christian I’ve met agrees that prayer is the Christian’s most important spiritual discipline, while also confessing it’s a discipline with which they struggle the most. We all could use a little training in the life of prayer, and that’s where the Psalter, Israel’s daily prayer book, can help. Peterson describes the Psalms as “God’s gift to train us in prayer that is comprehensive and honest.” Each psalm, he adds, is a prayer, “answering the God who has addressed us,” (1989, pp. 3 and 5). The address from God comes in many forms—an accident, a surprise, a joy, a word, a pandemic gone viral; each psalm is a response to a real life situation.
My disciplined practice of praying the Psalms has taught me more about prayer and the life of prayer [think, the spiritual life], than anything else. The lessons I learned have made me realize that the Psalms are necessary for the ongoing life of the Christian.
Before I highlight the lessons I’ve learned, a word about who wrote the psalms. The quick answer to that question is we don’t know. About two-thirds of the psalms include a name—of David; of Asaph, etc., and we’ve assumed this meant author. But that isn’t necessarily the case. ‘Of’ could mean author or owner or the intended recipient of the psalm. We may not know who wrote a psalm, but we do know that the 150 psalms were compiled into a prayer book for all the people of Israel. This means that the psalms are for the people of God and were prayed with the community and not alone in isolation, even though the pronoun is often first person singular. Because the authorship is unknown, because these are community prayers, and for the sake of inclusivity of all peoples, I will alternate pronouns, between feminine, masculine or plural.
LESSONS ABOUT PRAYER
This isn’t an exhaustive list of lesson I’ve learned, but some of the most meaningful for me.
1. We don’t need to dress in our best
When I was a child I dressed up in my best to attend a church service. It rubbed off and I assumed God expected me to ‘dress in my best’ when I prayed. I mean, I thought when I came into God’s presence, I must show God positive feelings and thoughts (my best), and hide the negative ones. I wasn’t deliberately trying to deceive God, I just believed God wanted to see me at my best. As a result, my prayers were more like the hypocritical Pharisees Jesus rebuked, who “for the sake of appearance say long prayers” (Luke 20:47), than the brutal honesty of the psalmists; more like the Pharisee who prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people,” than the sinner who pleaded from a distance, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:11ff).
Praying the psalms revealed my hypocrisy. I had to change my mind and stop praying prayers that lacked integrity because they were for the sake of appearances. I thought positive thoughts and feelings would make others, including God think better of me. I kept my negative emotions such as anger, depression, and hatred unexpressed when I prayed. I lived in fear of punishment if I displayed anything but a positive attitude and happy feelings. I often struggled with anger, depression, hatred, disappointment, sadness, but could never admit those feelings to God. Instead, I pretended I was peaceful, happy and loving. Did I really think I was deceiving God? I don’t think so, even though I maintained the hypocrisy well into adulthood. To impress my faith community and out of fear of God’s judgment, I kept up the pretense of being what I thought was a good spiritual pray-er. Until I began daily praying the Psalms and was challenged to ‘undress’.
I discovered that the community who wrote and prayed these psalms cared little about flattering their religious egos by impressing others, were unconcerned about finding and expressing themselves, and never tried manipulating God to act according to their will. Their prayers are very unlike the typical extemporaneous, quickly uttered prayers with which I was familiar. The Psalms are different prayers because they are always a truthful, and thus a real response to God’s initiative. They possess what Peterson called an “angular austerity” (1989, p. 5), because they leave behind the polite, the civil, the politically correct. As I prayed the psalms I was forced to think, as Walter Brueggemann puts it, the unthinkable and utter the unutterable. Even worse, warns Brueggemann, “they lead us away from the comfortable religious claims of ‘modernity’ in which everything is managed and controlled” (1984, p. 53). Psalms move us into a world where God, and not the self, has absolute control. I could no longer attempt any deceptions. The Psalms prevented it. So, I quit dressing up in my best when I prayed.
2. We can pray the bad and the ugly, not just the good
Because the psalmists never dressed in their best, they also never practiced pretense. Their prayers express both pain and joy in passionate, poetic language, leaving us in no doubt about their true thoughts and feelings. They prayed all their emotions, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I used to be afraid to pray so passionately with them, until I finally realized that the Psalms are as much God’s words as Paul’s controlled prayers in the New Testament. Those who pray the psalms consistently discover God delights in their passion and graphic language. God never punished them for it. A wide range of emotions are poured out before the Lord, proving John Calvin right when he noted, “the Psalms are an ‘anatomy of the soul,’ fully articulating every facet of the cost and joy of life with God” [2]. Praying the Psalms is an emotional experience, sometimes disturbing and sometimes joyful. I learned to pray my emotions.
Praying the good
Praying the good (as in praise psalms) is common praying today. It’s what most of us are comfortable with. Thus, we mostly read the ‘happy’ (praise) psalms. We sing them in our ancient hymns and our contemporary praise songs. We share them with our friends when they’re in distress. There are plenty of praise psalms in the Psalter to pray, sing and share. Many of the praise psalms overflow with exuberant and loving praise. They are filled with passion, no doubt sung (and Israel sang their prayers) in uninhibited fashion.
This uninhibited emotion, I’ll confess was new to me. Not only did I hide my negative emotions, I also toned down the positive. My prayers were devoid of passion of any kind, until I prayed, and not merely quickly read, psalms like 145-150. These final six psalms are the only psalms in the Psalter that are pure praise to and about God. Psalms 146-150 begin and end with the Hebrew word halel, hallelujah or ‘praise the Lord’ in our English Bibles. The joy overflows, gathers momentum and crescendos in the finale as the pray-er shouts, “Let everything that breathes praise the LORD! Halel!” Faith in God’s presence and power to act lovingly in his world is ecstatic. All of creation is called to join in this joyful praise to God. These praise Psalms are ‘turn-up-the-music-and-get-up-and-dance’ kind of prayers. It’s challenging to remain seated while praying these psalms at the end of the Psalter. Of course, they’re not the only praise psalms. Praise weaves throughout the Psalter, coming to an ecstatic climax in these final psalms.
The bad and ugly: praying lament
We’re most familiar with the happy praise psalms because they’re the ones we most often turn to, even when our world is falling apart. But there are as many, if not more ‘bad and ugly’ psalms that we too often omit. Thanks to the psalms, I learned to bring the bad and ugly into God’s presence, and dared to utter the unutterable. We call these psalms lament, which simply means complaint. In these psalms, the lament, as N. T. Wright suggests, “is what happens when people ask, ‘Why?’ and don’t get an answer” [3]. They complain. Often. Like the psalmist who prayed, “Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan” (55:17). Three times a day he complained to God! So much for telling Christians they shouldn’t complain!
Laments are complaints to God about many things besides God’s failure to answer the pray-er’s questions. Often they complain about God’s seeming absence, or distance, or indifference, or unconcern. For instance, Psalm 13 begins: “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” It’s a lament that is repeated over and over in the Psalter. Because God remains distant the pray-er’s situation gets worse, her mood deteriorates and she complains. A variety of moods are expressed in these laments, including depression, anger, hatred and a desire for revenge on an enemy or oppressive injustice. The words used are graphic and even alarming, especially to us Westerners who’ve been schooled to be nice at all times to all people. Laments aren’t nice! They train us to name and own our true feelings and think unthinkable thoughts.
Psalm 88 taught me to own and pray my depression and despair. It’s a scary psalm to pray. It’s tone remains negative from the first stanza to the last line. There isn’t a single word of praise in it. The pray-er was in a pit, that kept getting deeper. She is in genuine pain and feels absolutely alone in the world. Her prayer expresses her despair as she waits for God who is slow to act and remains hidden. Because there’s no hope, she concludes with the depressing lament, “darkness is my only friend” (v18, NIV). Here is a painful complaint about the absence and silence of God. It echoes the opening line of Psalm 22, the one Jesus prayed from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Praying these psalms enabled me to admit that I too often experience God as absent and uncaring. It was a relief to confess that fact and find myself in good company, including the company of Jesus.
Anger is another emotion I suppressed as unspiritual, even sinful but that the psalms taught me to name and own. Many psalms, including ones attributed to David, express despair, anger and hatred and include instructions for God to deal harshly with the enemy who brought about the trial. In Psalm 69 the pray-er complains, “Insults have broken my heart, so that I am in despair” (v20). No one would pity or comfort him, and so he pleads, “Pour out your indignation upon them [his enemy], and let your burning anger overtake them” (v24). Worse, he gives God specific and cruel suggestions, “Let them be blotted out of the book of the living; let them not be enrolled among the righteous” (v28). The prayer is real, passionate and honest.
Psalm 109 expresses something akin to hatred. The psalmist prays that his enemy’s days be few, his wife a widow and his children orphans (vv8-9). This Psalm is described by Brueggemann as a “raw undisciplined song of hate and wish for vengeance by someone who has suffered deep hurt and humiliation” (1984, p. 83). The Hebrew exiles in Babylon express similar feelings for their captors in Psalm 137. They were depressed and angry about their exile and sang a mournful prayer to their God, complaining that they couldn’t (or maybe wouldn’t) sing the songs of Zion while in captivity and then suggest the unutterable: “Happy shall they be who take your [Babylonians’] little ones and dash them against a rock” (v9). This was prayer to God, prayed in his presence and with all the people of God. Psalmists may tell God what to do, but they never act out their own wishes, even when God ignores their suggestions. They tell God and then leave it with God, trusting God to act in God's own way.
When we consider Jesus’ commandment, “Love your enemies” (Mt 5:44), we may well wonder whether these psalms that express hatred are ones Christians can pray. Which is another lesson I learned.
3. We can utter the unutterable, think the unthinkable and speak it to God
In his commentary on the Psalms, Derek Kidner suggests that some lament psalms, especially the ones expressing hateful words, create “an embarrassing problem for the Christian, who is assured that all Scripture is inspired and profitable, but equally that he himself is to bless those who curse him.” He also suggests that the short answer to the question whether the Christian can use these hateful cries of vengeance “must surely be No” (1973, pp. 25-6 and 32). Perhaps he has a point, but they were preserved in the Book we call, The Word of God. Surely they’re meant to be uttered by the people of God who find themselves in distressing situations through unjust treatment? I believe there is room to pray the ‘embarrassing’ psalms for a number of reasons.
First, as I mentioned, they’re in our Holy Scripture. When the early church determined which books belonged in God’s Word, they didn’t take out the cries of vengeance and other politically incorrect and negative psalms. Therefore, we’re expected to read and pray them, even in this age of Jesus’ command to ‘love our enemies.’ You see, the cries for vengeance are indicative of pray-ers’ passion for justice. They knew God delights in, indeed loves justice (see Ps 37:28; 99:4). Their cry for vengeance was made to God and left with God. The pray-er trusted God to act justly and rightly. He never took matters into his own hands.
Second, lament psalms are included because the compilers of the Psalter believed that all of life, not just the comfortable and good belong within the domain and concern of the Almighty God and should be brought by us into God’s presence. Nothing, not even our hatred, is outside of God’s Sovereign Rule. Besides, God knows about it so we may as well admit it to ourselves in God’s presence. Walter Brueggemann notes, “The Psalms draw our entire life under the rule of God, where everything may be submitted to the God of the gospel” (1984, p. 15). This is indeed good news (gospel). The psalms are necessary to guide us about how to bring all of life to God.
Third, they keep us in touch with life as it really is. Life includes pain and suffering, health and well-being, joy and sorrow. As a spiritual director once taught me, life goes in a repetitive cycle of calm, disaster, rescue and joy. This is the cycle of the 150 psalms, taking us through, joy and sorrow, loss and well-being, praise and lament, from beginning to end. They give us a way to bring all of life into the presence of a loving God even when God seems distant.
Fourth, when we sing only the happy psalms, we’re in danger of living in denial of life as it really is. Walter Brueggemann warns, “The problem with a hymnody that focuses on equilibrium, coherence, and symmetry [think happy songs and prayers] is that it may deceive and cover over. Life is not like that. Life is also savagely marked by disequilibrium, incoherence, and unrelieved asymmetry” (1984, p. 51). Lament psalms give us permission to release our pent-up emotions in God’s presence, believing God can handle them. A God who can’t, isn’t a God I want.
Fifth, the psalms that express emotion in the raw assure us that God is bigger than our emotions. One day my five-year old nephew was mad at me for not letting him do something he wasn’t supposed to do. He yelled, “I hate you. I’m never going to play with you again,” and stormed out. Five minutes later he came back. His anger and hatred forgotten as he asked, “Jackie, will you come and play with me?” Of course I did. I was older and more mature than my five-year old nephew. His little temper tantrum didn’t alter my relationship with him. I let him get it out of his system and waited for him to come back. I knew he would. I just thought it would take longer than five minutes. So too God, who is so much greater than you or me, can handle our emotions. Sometimes I think God lets us behave like children because he knows we’ll be back wanting ‘to play,’ willing to submit once again to his sovereignty.
Finally, lament psalms are included in a book whose Hebrew title, tehillim, (‘psalms’ in English) means “praises or songs of praise.” There are as many, if not more lament psalms than praise psalms but they too are called ‘songs of praises’ because offering them to God is as much an act of praise and worship as singing our joyful praise songs. The psalmists didn’t believe, as many Christians seem to, that negativity is indicative of no faith, and therefore a sin. On the contrary, the psalms of darkness, far from being indicative of failure and disbelief, are acts of bold faith because they refuse to live life in pretense and they insist that all of life, the good and bad, should be brought to God for discourse [4]. They are a clear statement of faith in a God who is above us and in control and also one of us in loving relationship with us. Each Psalm is addressed to God, by one who boldly believes in God’s presence and willingness to act on their behalf, even though the felt experience of the pray-er is very different, as in Psalm 88. The pray-er often complains about the absence of God, but addresses her prayer to God, as though God were present. As I have boldly prayed and lamented with these psalmists, my faith has been deepened.
4. Know before Whom you stand
The psalmists were unafraid to be real in God’s presence and lament honestly because they had a good understanding of the God before whom they stood. I mean, they had good theology, which means that praying the psalms is a theological exercise. I know that many Christians don’t like to think of prayer and theology in the same space. Some Christians have told me that theology can be harmful and will lead us astray. Others believe it belongs in the halls of academia and is irrelevant for the average person seeking to live a good Christian life. Perhaps we’ve simply misunderstood the meaning of theology and therefore the importance of theology for our prayer life.
My favorite definition of theology comes from the 4th century saint, Evagrius of Pontus, who firmly believed that prayer and theology belong together. He wrote, “A theologian is one whose prayer is true.” There is no prayer without theology, and only bad theology where there is no prayer. The moment we address God in prayer, we’re doing theology! The psalmists always knew this. Even Jesus taught the importance of theology to prayer. When the disciples asked, “Lord, teach us to pray,” Jesus not only gave them a prayer to recite, he also taught them, through parables, about the God to whom they prayed (Luke 11:1-13). The Jewish Rabbi, Abraham Heschel insisted that “prayer cannot live in a theological vacuum. It comes out of insight.” Therefore, he urged, “When you pray, know before Whom you stand” (1996, p. 108). Because theology is about “people of faith using their minds to understand who God is and how he works” (Peterson, 1989, p. 13), it must be accompanied by prayer. Theology is the prayerful discipline of coming to know the Triune God more intimately and being transformed into God’s image. Theology, therefore, is a relational activity.
So too is prayer. In its broadest meaning, prayer is a lifestyle of growing in an intimate, loving relationship with the Triune God. In prayer we enter the presence of and communicate with the Triune God. Prayer is always an encounter with God. It is a response to God, who addressed us first. It is imperative that we know before Whom we stand. The reluctance of so many Christians today to be real in God’s presence, their fear of praying the psalms of ‘darkness,’ is, I believe, a result of bad theology. We don’t know the God to whom we pray and so we go to God the way we go to church, dressed in our best. This wasn’t true of the ancient Hebrews who prayed the psalms. They were free to be real in God’s presence, express life exactly as they experienced it, because they knew God was much bigger than anything they might bring to him. As Peterson observes, Psalms “were prayed by people who understood that God had everything to do with them. God, not their feelings, was the center” (1989, p. 14). They didn’t pray in order to express themselves. They prayed because they recognized that God had addressed them in their day to day life experiences.
Their theology is evident in the many terms used to address God and the variety of images used to describe God. Sometimes they use God’s name, YHWH, always translated in English Bibles as LORD, sometimes simply as God, but many times they use an image—refuge, strength, shepherd, guide, teacher, and so many more. Their prayers often include some of the creedal (belief) statements from Scripture. (Psalm 86, for instance, draws on the ancient truth about God found in Exodus 34:6-7. Other psalms recall God’s works done in the past, as Ps 77.) The psalms were prayed by a people who were passionate about their God and who knew the stories about God. Praying them will enrich your relationship with God and give you new forms of address and a deeper respect for the past activity of God.
HOW TO PRAY THE PSALMS
The Psalms will teach us how to pray so long as we pray them. But how? You may ask. There’s no right or wrong way to pray psalms. We each find our own way. I can only give suggestions to get you started.
1. Just keep at it
In one sense, it’s easy to pray the psalms. The words are in front of you and all you have to do is read them, as written. We all know how to do that. In another sense, it’s downright difficult. Praying through all 150 psalms requires discipline, a determination to keep showing up to prayerfully read the next psalm, whether it matches our mood, our circumstance or not. It’s not easy to pray the depressing lament of Psalm 88 when your mood is upbeat, more in tune with the joyous praise of Psalm 150. Praying a lament when we’re feeling upbeat is a chance to pray for someone in the world who needs that lament, praying in solidarity with a fellow believer. Sometimes the psalm gives us words to prayer for others. Kathleen Norris learned this and wrote, “Psalm 74’s lament on the violation of sacred space: ‘Every cave in the land is a place where violence has made its home’ (v20) has become for me a prayer for the victims and perpetrators of domestic violence” (1996, p. 102). The psalm might not express my life, but it expresses another’s, and I pray it for them. It’s also hard to pray an upbeat praise psalm when you’re in trying times (lockdown because of a pandemic) and would prefer a cry for vengeance or one of despair. We offer praise with and for those who are in a praise mood. Praise psalms also give us hope that we, in time, will get out of our pits. It takes discipline to just keep at it, but it’s not an impossible task.
2. Start at the very beginning and keep going to the end
When I began praying the psalms, no one taught me how. So, I began with Psalm 1 and made a slow journey through to 150. I’ve since learned that many saints, especially those who live together in religious communities that pray psalms multiple times a day, match a psalm with the time of day and even the season of the year. They jump back and forth rather than praying from beginning to end. I discovered a few benefits in my way of praying the psalms and so keep at it.
The Psalter is divided into five different books (you’ll see this in the Bible as a new book begins) but there is no logical reason why a psalm appears in a particular Book. They aren’t arranged historically, with all Davidic psalms in one book and post-Davidic in another. That would make sense. Neither are they arranged by type of psalm, with all joyful psalms in one book, depressing ones in another, cries for vengeance separated from psalms of confession and so on. Which would be nice, making it easier to find a psalm to suit our mood and experience. There’s no apparent ordering of the psalms. They’re all mixed up! For a reason.
There is a logical, albeit gradual progression through the book. It goes from mostly lament in the beginning to pure joyful praise at the end. The psalms of lament dominate the first three books, usually mixed in with some praise. Lament is less heard in book four and totally disappears by the time we reach Psalm 145 in book five. The Psalter, prayed from beginning to end, takes us through the life cycle of joy, sorrow, despair and back to joy, many times over. We keep repeating the pattern as we begin again with Psalm 1. Psalms assure us that, even though life always has pain, we’ll get past it to joy “in the morning.” As Peterson observed, the Psalms are “one hundred and fifty carefully crafted prayers that deal with the great variety of operations that God carries on in us and attend to all parts of our lives that are, at various times and in different ways, rebelling and trusting, hurting and praising” (1989, pp. 2-3). And we pray this cycle many times over when we begin at the beginning and keep going to the end. So begin today and pray Psalm 1, tomorrow pray Psalm 2, the next day, Psalm 3 and keep going to Psalm 150 and then begin all over again.
3. Don’t read more than you can handle
When you get started on praying the psalms, the most ancient and most common of biblical spiritual disciplines (even Jesus prayed the psalms), don’t take on more than you can handle. I mean, don’t attempt to read the entire psalm if it’s a long one. Fortunately, the Psalter begins with short psalms. The first long one is Psalm 18 (50 verses). When I began praying the psalms, I limited myself to 10-12 verses at a time. Thus, Psalm 18 took a few days. As I’ve grown and benefited from praying psalms, I have increased the amount I pray each night. There’s no formal rule. Pray as many verses as you can handle.
4. Choose a time and stick to it
There’s no right or wrong way to pray the psalms. There’s no right or wrong time of day to pray them. The Anglican/Episcopal Book of Common Prayer has a plan for praying the 150 Psalms in one month, praying three times a day. That’s not possible for most people. My favorite time is immediately before bed. I spend time reflecting on and journaling about the day and then pray the next psalm, or portion of one, on my list. Sometimes the psalm is exactly what I need, most often, it isn’t. Pick a time of day, mark it in your calendar and just stick to it. As I said, praying the Psalms, as with all praying, takes discipline.
Conclusion
As I pray the Psalter my life of prayer has been and continues to be slowly transformed. This discipline isn’t magic. The transformations have been neither quick in coming nor easy to come by. The task remains a discipline, constantly working against the inertia of my human nature, training my soul to be consistent and regular in this ancient Hebrew and Christian spiritual discipline, and practicing patient waiting over the long-haul. The transformations are only noticed as I look back over years of consistency, stubbornly persisting with the Psalter. Psalm praying remains my most consistent spiritual discipline; the one routine that I can continue when all other routines have been messed with. The claim that “the Psalms are necessary,” no longer seems extravagant to me. It is an experienced truth.
[1] Unless otherwise stated, all Scripture references are from the NRSV.
[2] Quoted in Brueggemann, Walter. The Message of the Psalms. 1984: 17.
[3] https://time.com/5808495/coronavirus-christianity/ Accessed 4/2/20.
[4] See Brueggemann, 1984, p. 52.
Works Cited
Brueggemann, Walter. The Message of the Psalms. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House. 1984.
Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Moral Granduer and Spiritual Audacity. Essays edited by Susannah Heschel.
New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1996.
Kidner, Derek. Psalms 1-72. Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press. 1973.
Norris, Kathleen. The Cloister Walk. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. 1996.
Peterson, Eugene. Answering God. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. 1989.
Jackie L. Smallbones, ThD. 2020©
You're welcome to copy this, but please contact me, the author first.
