THE BOOK OF PSALMS

• THE BOOK OF PSALMS
• Introduction
• Costacurta, Bruna, Class notes: Biblical Exegesis on Selected Psalms. (1st Semester 2001-2002, Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome).
• Polish, Daniel, Bringing the Psalms to Life: How to Understand and Use the Book of Psalms. (Woodstock, 2000).
• The Book of Psalms in the life of the Church and Israel
• As priests and religious, we intimately encounter the Psalms daily.
• In fact many a times during the day.
• The Divine Office, the official prayer of the Church to sanctify the different hours of the day and to give glory to our God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is essentially  based on the Psalms.
• More importantly when we celebrate the Eucharist to listen to the Word of God and to partake of His Body and Blood, it is the Psalms that put words into our hearts and lips so that we can fully respond to the Word of God being proclaimed in our midst.
• The Psalms in the Life of Israel, God’s Chosen People
• A note about the place of Psalms in the lives of the Chosen People of God, Israel, is worth mentioning.
• The Psalms themselves are but fruits of their own encounters with God as His Chosen People through the ends and outs of their history and daily lives.
• For Israel, they find POWER IN THESE ANCIENT POEMS.
• They experienced being pulled by these hymns, a pull that causes them to read the Psalm over and over again, a pull that long ago led people to evolve the worship service itself so that they could visit—and reinterpret—psalms regularly.
• In a word, the Psalms are so BELOVED by Israel.
• A clue to the power of the Book of Psalms can be found in the life of a well-known contemporary hero of the Jewish people, former Soviet refusenik Anatoly Sharansky, who became Nathan Sharansky when he migrated to Israel in 1986.
• Sharansky had been held prisoner by Soviet authorities, detained in solitary confinement for years with nothing to read but this book of Psalms.
• His wife Avital wrote about the imprisonment of Sharansky.
• She said,

  “Anatoly has been educated to his Jewishness in a lonely cell in Chistopol Prison, where locked alone with the Psalms of David, he found expression for his innermost feelings in the outpourings of the king of Israel thousand of years ago.”

• In his love of the Psalms, and in FINDING HIS DEEPEST FEELINGS GIVEN VOICE IN THE PSALMS, Sharansky was the embodiment of every Jew for the last three hundred years, and every Christian, too.
• Somehow the Psalms put us in TOUCH WITH WHAT MATTERS MOST TO US, and EXPRESS THOSE FEELINGS MORE CLEARLY AND MOVINGLY THAN WE CAN EXPRESS THEM OURSELVES.
• Psalms as Beloved
• More than any other part of Scriptures, we can say that the Psalms are not beloved because they are holy, but that THEY ARE HOLY BECAUSE THEY ARE BELOVED.
• We do not turn the Psalms out of a sense of obligation. We read Psalms because they help us CONFRONT the PAINS and CHALLENGES that are PART OF EVERY HUMAN LIFE.
• Psalms help us PUT INTO WORDS what WE EXPERIENCE and FEEL; more than many will tell you, Psalms help us OVERCOME OUR PROBLEMS and BEAR the BURDENS that LIFE PLACES ON ALL OF US.
• What has made the Psalms so BELOVED and POWERFUL is NOT their divinity , but THEIR HUMANITY.
• For Psalms GREW out of the SOIL of HUMAN EXPERIENCE.
• They talk to us in the VOICE of a FELLOW JOURNEYER ALONG LIFE’S PATH, and they have within them the resources to help us when the journey gets difficult.
• An Invitation to Becoming Friends with the Book of Psalms
• Given these Christian and Jewish perspectives of the Psalms, may I invite you as individuals and as a community, to consciously and personally MAKE  the Book of Psalms YOUR FRIEND.
• Like a good and faithful friend, the Psalms help us UNDERSTAND MORE ABOUT OURSELVES.
• In fact if we will strive to become friends with the Psalms, we can turn to them AS TRUE FRIENDS FOR HELP in our TIMES OF NEED.
• Just like what Jesus did as He painfully hung Himself on the Cross, it was to Psalm 22 that He turned Himself for help: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”
• Each of us brings our own particular experience to everything each of us does.
• Our histories and struggles shape the way we see our world and the way we understand everything we study.
• No book of the Bible lends itself as much as Psalms does to being read through the lenses of our own circumstances and search.
• The Book of Psalms talks to our SPIRITUAL QUEST: our DESIRE TO FIND GOD and our FRUSTRATION that God often seems REMOTE, HIDDEN, UNAPPROACHALBE, and UNKNOWABLE.
• Psalms talks to human PAIN—ILLNESS and FEAR, and to the SENSE that we sometimes have of being ABANDONED.
• Psalms knows the STING of FAILURE and the DISTRESS of being BETRAYED by people WE TRUSTED.
• Psalms can be the voice through which we CRY OUT FOR HELP, and Psalms can be the GUIDE through which the LOST BEGIN to be FOUND.
• The power of the Psalms lies in their ability to speak directly and personally to the human condition.
• As St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, wrote:

   “The Psalms embrace the entire human life, express every emotion of the soul, every impulse of the heart—[The Psalms speak for you] when your soul yearns for penance and confession, when your spirit is depressed or joyous…when your soul is yearning to express its thanks to God, or its pain…”

• Psalm 51:1-2  Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love; according to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.  2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!
• Psalm 31:10-12   For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my misery, and my bones waste away.  11 I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors, an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me.  12 I have passed out of mind like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel.
• Psalm 9:1-2  I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart; I will tell of all thy wonderful deeds.  2 I will be glad and exult in thee, I will sing praise to thy name, O Most High.
• Indeed the Psalms are remarkably human.
• They validate the whole range of human emotions.
• Psalms start with the recognition of just how fragile life is : we suffer, we experience fear and exaltation, we meet with success and failure, we know contentment and anxiety, we experience betrayal, have enemies, even know rage and the desire for revenge, and we find vindication, comfort, new confidence.
• The Psalms give voice to all of these emotions and help us put them in context.
• They help us marshal our resources so that we can move from HURT to HEALING, from the VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH back to the HIGH PLACES of life.
• The Psalms hold out hope for us, even in our darkest hours.
• Above all, the Psalms encourage us to give voice to our emotions and pour our hearts to God.
• In Psalms, we watch the DRAMA of SALVATION ENACTED—not salvation on the grand cosmological scale, but the SIMPLE STORY OF PEOPLE SAVED FROM THE BURDENS THAT OPPRESSED THEM.
• Psalms talks of THANKSGIVING—breaking out in SHOUTS of JOY and GRATITUDE when DARKNESS that THREATENED to ENVELOP US is pierced by RAYS of HOPE.
• Psalms shows us the PATH to TRIUMPH and provides the SONGS to SING when we have PREVAILED.
• Psalm 33:1-5  Rejoice in the LORD, O you righteous! Praise befits the upright.  2 Praise the LORD with the lyre, make melody to him with the harp of ten strings!  3 Sing to him a new song, play skilfully on the strings, with loud shouts.  4 For the word of the LORD is upright; and all his work is done in faithfulness.  5 He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the LORD.
• One can say that Psalms does all of this AS ANY FRIEND SHOULD—without LECTURING, DEMANDING, OR COERCING.
• Psalms TEACHES BY EXAMPLE, by SHOWING US, “I’VE BEEN THERE, THAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME, AND THIS IS HOW I MADE IT THROUGH.”
• This PERSONAL MESSAGE of the Book of Psalms is the REASON people have turned to it for thousand years.
• It is the POWER LATENT in Psalms that has made it THE FIRST REFUGE OF PEOPLE IN DISTRESS.
• That power has not diminished over time.
• It remains EVER-PRESENT and AVAILABLE to us, if we know how to find it.
• Turning to the Book of Psalms, learning where to look and how to understand it, is a study we undertake not from some lofty, theoretical vantage, but from the VERY HUMAN NEED TO MAKE OUR LIVES BETTER, MORE AT EASE, and WHOLE.
• We are drawn to Psalms, as generations before us were, not by abstract curiosity, but by COMPULSION—NOT FIGURATIVE, but LITERAL—TO SAVE OUR LIVES, or better still, THAT OUR LIVES BE SAVED, since it is beyond us to SAVE ourselves.
• Psalms still holds the power to help us through the DARKEST TIMES, give us our BEARINGS, and ENRICH our lives.
• I hope and pray that this exposition may lead us to REDISCOVER THE WHOLE-MAKING and HEALING POWER of the Psalms.
• May we truly make the Psalms our FRIENDS.