The Cloister Walk (14 page)

Not having been to church for some twenty years following high school, I rediscovered the psalms by accident, through my unexpected attraction to Benedictine liturgy, of which the psalms are the mainstay. A Benedictine community recites or sings psalms at morning, noon, and evening prayer, going through the entire Psalter every three or four weeks. As I began to immerse myself in monastic liturgy, I found that I was also immersed in poetry and was grateful to find that the poetic nature of the psalms, their constant movement between the mundane and the exalted, means, as British Benedictine Sebastian Moore has said, that “God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systematic theology,” and also that the images of the psalms, “rough-hewn from earthy experience, [are] absolutely different from formal prayer.”

I also discovered, in two nine-month sojourns with the St. John's community, that as Benedictine prayer rolls on, as daily as marriage and washing dishes, it tends to sweep away the concerns of systematic theology and church doctrine. All of that is there, as a kind of scaffolding, but the psalms demand engagement, they ask you to read them with your whole self, praying, as St. Benedict says, “in such a way that our minds are in harmony with our voices.” Experiencing the psalms in this away allowed me gradually to let go of that childhood God who had set an impossible standard for both formal prayer and faith, convincing me that religion wasn't worth exploring because I couldn't “do it right.”

I learned that when you go to church several times a day, every day, there is no way you can “do it right.” You are not always going to sit up straight, let alone think holy thoughts. You're not going to wear your best clothes but whatever isn't in the dirty clothes basket. You come to the Bible's great “book of praises” through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you may feel like hell, you sing anyway. To your surprise, you find that the psalms do not deny your true feelings but allow you to reflect on them, right in front of God and everyone. I soon realized, during my first residency at St. John's, that this is not easy to do on a daily basis. Before, I'd always been a guest in a monastery for a week or less, and the experience was often a high. But now I was in it for a nine-month haul, and it was a struggle for me to go to choir when I didn't feel like it, especially if I was depressed (which, of course, is when I most needed to be there). I took great solace in knowing that everyone there had been through this struggle, and that some of them were struggling now with the absurdity, the monotony of repeating the psalms day after day.

I found that, even if it took a while—some prayer services I practically slept through, others I seemed to be observing from the planet Mars—the poetry of the psalms would break through and touch me. I became aware of three paradoxes in the psalms: that in them pain is indeed “missed—in Praise,” but in a way that takes pain fully into account; that though of all the books of the Bible the psalms speak most directly to the individual, they cannot be removed from a communal context; and that the psalms are holistic in insisting that the mundane and the holy are inextricably linked. The Benedictine method of reading psalms, with long silences between them rather than commentary or explanation, takes full advantage of these paradoxes, offering almost alarming room for interpretation and response. It allows the psalms their full poetic power, their use of imagery and hyperbole (“Awake, my soul, / awake lyre and harp, / I will awake the dawn” [Ps. 57:8]), repetition and contradiction, as tools of word-play as well as the play of human emotions. For all of their discipline, the Benedictines allowed me to relax and sing again in church; they allowed me, as one older sister, a widow with ten children, described it, to “let the words of the psalms wash over me, and experience the joy of just being with words.” As a poet I like to be with words. It was a revelation to me that this could be prayer; that this could be enough.

But to the modern reader the psalms can seem impenetrable: how in the world can we read, let alone pray, these angry and often violent poems from an ancient warrior culture? At a glance they seem overwhelmingly patriarchal, ill-tempered, moralistic, vengeful, and often seem to reflect precisely what is wrong with our world. And that's the point, or part of it. As one reads the psalms every day, it becomes clear that the world they depict is not really so different from our own; the fourth-century monk Athanasius wrote that the psalms “become like a mirror to the person singing them,” and this is as true now as when he wrote it. The psalms remind us that the way we judge each other, with harsh words and acts of vengeance, constitutes injustice, and they remind us that it is the powerless in society who are overwhelmed when injustice becomes institutionalized. Psalm 35, like many psalms, laments God's absence in our unjust world, even to the point of crying, “How long, O Lord, will you look on?” (v. 17). I take an odd comfort in recognizing that the ending of Psalm 12 is as relevant now as when it was written thousands of years ago: “Protect us forever from this generation / [for] . . . the worthless are praised to the skies” (vv. 7-8).

But this is not comfortable reading, and it goes against the American grain. A writer, whose name I have forgotten, once said that the true religions of America are optimism and denial. The psalms demand that we recognize that praise does not spring from a delusion that things are better than they are, but rather from the human capacity for joy. Only when we see this can we understand that both lamentation (“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord” [Ps. 130:1]) and exultation (“Cry with joy to the Lord, all the earth” [Ps. 100:1]) can be forms of praise. In our skeptical age, which favors appraisal over praise, the psalms are evidence that praise need not be a fruit of optimism. But Benedictine communities draw their members from the world around them and naturally reflect its values to some extent. Women in American society are conditioned to deny their pain, and to smooth over or ignore the effects of violence, even when it is directed against them. As one sister said to me, “Women seem to have trouble drawing the line between what is passive acceptance of suffering and what can transform it.” This is the danger that lies hidden in Emily Dickinson's insight that “Pain—is missed—in Praise”: that we will try to jump too quickly from one to the other, omitting the necessary but treacherous journey in between, sentimentalizing both pain and praise in the process.

The sister, speaking of the women she counsels—displaced homemakers, abused wives, women returning to college after years away—says, “It doesn't help that the church has such a lousy track record here. We've said all these crappy things to people, especially to women: ‘Offer it up,' or ‘Suffering will make you strong.' Jesus doesn't say these things. He says, ‘This will cost you.' ”

Anger is one honest reaction to the cost of pain, and the psalms are full of anger. Psalm 39 begins with a confident assertion of self-control: “I will be watchful of my ways / for fear I should sin with my tongue” (v. 1). The tone soon changes in a way familiar to anyone who is prone to making such resolutions only to watch them fall apart: “The prosperity [of the wicked] stirred my grief. / My heart was burning within me. / At the thought of it, the fire blazed up / and my tongue burst into speech . . .” (vv. 2-3). Typically, although judgment is implied in calling another person wicked, the psalmist's anger is directed primarily at God, with the bitter question, “And now, Lord, what is there to wait for?” (v. 7).

Many Benedictine women find that the psalms provide an outlet for such anger; the psalms don't theologize or explain anger away. One reason for this is that the psalms are poetry, and poetry's function is not to explain but to offer images and stories that resonate with our lives. Walter Brueggemann, a Lutheran theologian, writes in
Israel's Praise
that in the psalms pain acts both as “the locus of possibility” and “the matrix of praise.” This is a dangerous insight, as risky as Dickinson's. There's a fine line between idealizing or idolizing pain, and confronting it with hope. But I believe that both writers are speaking the truth about the psalms. The value of this great songbook of the Bible lies not in the fact that singing praise can alleviate pain but that the painful images we find there are essential for praise, that without them, praise is meaningless. It becomes the “dreadful cheer” that Minnesota author Carol Bly has complained of in generic American Christianity, which blinds itself to pain and thereby makes a falsehood of its praise.

People who rub up against the psalms every day come to see that while children may praise spontaneously, it can take a lifetime for adults to recover this ability. One sister told me that when she first entered the convent as an idealistic young woman, she had tried to pretend that “praise was enough.” It didn't last long. The earthy honesty of the psalms had helped her, she says, to “get real, get past the holy talk and the romantic image of the nun.” In expressing all the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the psalms act as good psychologists. They defeat our tendency to try to be holy without being human first. Psalm 6 mirrors the way in which our grief and anger are inextricably mixed; the lament that “I am exhausted with my groaning; / every night I drench my pillow with tears” (v. 6) soon leads to rage: “I have grown old surrounded by my foes. / Leave me, you who do evil (vv. 7-8). Psalm 38 stands on the precipice of depression, as wave after wave of bitter self-accusation crashes against the small voice of hope. The psalm is clinically accurate in its portrayal of extreme melancholia: “the very light has gone from my eyes” (v. 10), “my pain is always before me” (v. 17), and its praise is found only in the possibility of hope: “It is for you, O Lord, that I wait” (v. 15). Psalm 88 is one of the few that ends without even this much praise. It takes us to the heart of pain and leaves us there, saying, “My one companion is darkness” (v. 18). We can only hope that this darkness is a friend, one who provides a place in which our deepest wounds can heal.

The psalms make us uncomfortable because they don't allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation into praise. As a Benedictine sister in her fifties, having recently come through both the loss of a job and the disintegration of a long-term friendship, put it to me, “I feel as if God is rebuilding me, ‘binding up my wounds' (Ps. 147:3). “But,” she adds, “I'm tired, and little pieces of the psalms are all I can handle. Once you've fallen apart, you take what nourishment you can. The psalms feel to me like a gentle spring rain: you hardly know that it's sinking in, but something good happens.”

The psalms reveal our most difficult conflicts, and our deep desire, in Jungian terms, to run from the shadow. In them, the shadow speaks to us directly, in words that are painful to hear. In recent years, some Benedictine houses, particularly women's communities, have begun censoring the harshest of the psalms, often called the “cursing psalms,” from their public worship. But one sister, a liturgist, said after visiting such a community, “I began to get antsy, feeling,
something is not right.
The human experience is of violence, and the psalms reflect our experience of the world.”

The psalms are full of shadows—enemies, stark images of betrayal: “Even my friend, in whom I trusted, / who ate my bread, has turned against me” (Ps. 41:9). Psalm 10 contains an image of a lion who “lurks in hiding” (10:9) that calls to my mind the sort of manipulative people whose true colors come out only behind the doors of their “lairs.” Psalm 5 pictures flatterers, “their throat a wide-open grave, all honey their speech” (v. 9). As C. S. Lewis has noted in
Reflections on the Psalms,
when the psalms speak to us of lying and deceit, “no historical readjustment is required. We are in the world we know.”

But all-American optimism, largely a middle-class and Protestant phenomenon, doesn't want to know this world. We want to conquer evil by being nice, and nice people don't want to soil their white gloves with the gritty anger at the heart of a cursing psalm such as 109, in which the psalmist is driven to cry out against his tormentor: “He loved cursing; let curses fall upon him. / He scorned blessing; let blessing pass him by.” The imagery roils like a whirlpool, drawing us in and down: “He put on cursing like his coat; / let it soak into his body like water; / let it sink like oil into his bones . . .” (vv. 17-18).

Evidently in the Hebrew it is clear that this breathtaking catalogue of curses, as one commentary reads, “should be understood as the curses of the psalmist's enemy against him.” The intent is to show the bully what it's like to have “no one show any mercy” (v. 12), how it feels to be hated. But the poem also shows us how it feels
to
hate: its curses are not just a venting of anger but a devastatingly accurate portrait of the psychology of hatred. Though the psalmist starts out speaking of love, of praying for his enemies, he fails, as we tend to do when beset by evil, to keep the love foremost.

The psalmist finally reaches out of this paranoiac maelstrom, saying, “Let the Lord thus repay my accusers” (v. 20) and recalling his own true condition: “I am poor and needy / and my heart is pierced within me” (v. 22). This most painful of psalms ends with a whisper of praise, the plea of an exhausted man for help from a God “who stands at the poor man's side / to save him from those who condemn him” (v. 31).

It is good to fall back into silence after reading this psalm out loud, to recall that it is a true prayer, in that it leaves ultimate judgment to God. But it also forces us to recognize that calling for God's judgment can feel dangerously good. It became clear to me in Benedictine liturgy that, as one sister explained, the “enemies” vilified in the cursing psalms are best seen as “my own demons, not ‘enemies out there.' ” But, she added, noting that the psalms always resist an attempt to use them in a facile manner, “you can't simply spiritualize all the enemies away.”