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.

WHAT ARE THE PSALMS

n  What are the Psalms

The Book of Psalms in the OT

In the Jewish Tradition, the Old Testament is

referred to as TANACH—which is an acronym for

the three major sections of the OT: 1) TORAH, the

first five books, 2) NEVI’IM, the prophets and 3)

K’TUVIM, writings, third section which is a miscellany of

various and varied literature, including the Song of Songs,

the Book of Esther, Lamentations, and the so called

“wisdom literature” of Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), Proverbs,

and Job. 

The Book of Psalms is found in this third

section of the Old Testament, the K’TUVIM

n  King David and the Psalms

n  Traditionally, Psalms is said to have been written by King David. Indeed, the Book of Psalms is frequently referred to as the Psalms of David. Midrah Tehillim, a medieval commentary on the Book of Psalms says: “Moses gave Israel the Five Books of the Torah and correspondingly, David gave them the Five Books of Psalms.

n  There is a lovely midrash—a rabbinic story—about King David.

n  It is said that when David went to sleep at night, he hung his harp over his bed.

n  As he slept, the four winds came and plucked the strings of his harp.

n  David would awake and sing along.

n  According to the story, these songs became the Psalms.

n  Why did King David’s association with the Psalms arise?

n  The most obvious reason is that out of the 150 Psalms, 73 begin with the superscription (introductory phrase) L’David.

n  The most obvious translation of the phrase L’David is “of David,” although it also has various other meanings.

n  The 73 Psalms then were taken to be that of David, and thus, by David.

n  By extension, the work as a whole was attributed to him.

n  The Book of Psalms can also be attributed to David because the very literary form of the work fits nicely with what we know about him.

n  The biography of David contained in the two Books of Samuel tells us a number of things that connect him to this work.

n  In his youth David was a skillful lyre player and an inventor of musical instruments.

n  He is said to have been a composer of songs and won his first public recognition as a singer.

n  He was acclaimed as the “sweet singer of Israel.”

n  Later, he is said to have been responsible for organizing the guilds of Temple singers and musicians.

n  Another reason for ascribing the Books of Psalms to King David is that many of the Psalms portray circumstances and emotional states that harmonize with what we read about David’s life in the books of First and Second Samuel and First Kings.

n  Thus one can associate some of the Psalms with specific aspects of the life of David.

n  Psalm 2 is easily linked to the establishment of the Davidic dynasty.

n  The shepherd motif of Psalm 23 and other Psalms can certainly be connected with David’s occupation in his younger days.

n  Psalm 110 can be read as depicting David’s coronation as king.

n  Most notably, Psalm 18 is duplicated in its entirety in 2 Samuel, Chapter 22.

n   Jewish tradition found this association with the life of King David so compelling that much of the commentary on the Book of Psalms is devoted to associating particular Psalms to events in David’s life.

n  Modern scholarship suggests that King David may not have written all of the Psalms, or any of them.

n  What can be stated with certainty is that many of the Psalms originated in a time much later than David’s lifetime (which was around 1000 BC).

n  Many appear to come from the time when the first Temple was standing, which was well after David’s death.

n   Some reflect specific historic events from later periods.

n  Most famously, Psalm 137 talks about the Babylonian Exile—hundreds of years after David’s death.

n  Others portray the return of the exiles to Jerusalem, the rebuilding of the Temple, and perhaps even its dedication.

n  However, there is a beautiful and rich theological significance of DAVID as the central human figure in the Book of Psalms.

n  He is a paradigm for Israel, for the whole of humanity, for each one of us.

n  For in the biblical David the FUNDAMENTAL EXPERIENCE OF HUMAN LIFE CAN BE FOUND:

n  He sought God.

n  He fell in love.

n  He sinned.

n  He repented.

n  He experienced forgiveness.

n  He is a man of ambition

n   He experienced deep joy and profound grief. 

n  He has many friends as well as enemies.

n  He knew loyalty as well as betrayal in friendship.

n  He was innocent as he was guilty.

n  He experienced birth and death of loved ones.

n  He was persecuted as well as lifted up.

n  He was generous yet greedy.

n  He was a king who suffered defeat and emerged triumphant.

n  He knew peace as well as violence.

n  In short, HE IS A MAN WHO KNEW LAUDS AND SUPPLICATIONS.

n  HE KNEW HOW IT IS TO PRAISE AND TO PRAY!

n  The Book of Psalms as the most unique

n  The 5 books of the Torah record the history of salvation.

n  They narrate and reveal the wonders God has done, beginning from the creation of the world, the establishment of His people, freedom from Egypt, to their journey to the promised land.

n  The Torah tells the story of God’s creative work and gift of salvation, God’s promises and their unfolding and fulfillment.

n  The original and fundamental revelation is thus contained in the Torah.

n  The Prophets on the other hand contain the word, another fundamental element, that interprets the history of salvation narrated in the Torah.

n  Moreover, the other books found in K’TUVIM, especially the wisdom literature are religious teachings.

n  They can be said to be another word of interpretation.

n  We take note of the MOVEMENT—from the STORY (the Torah) to the WORD OF INTERPRETATION (Prophets and The Writings, esp. the Wisdom Literature).

n   Then comes the Book of Psalms that contains the response of Israel to the STORY and ITS INTERPRETATION.

n  It is noteworthy that the Book of Psalms is divided in 5 sections.

n  This brings us back to the First Five Books of the OT, the Torah.

n  It thus signifies that the Book of Psalms is but a response as a prayer to God’s works of wonders and His salvation narrated in the Torah.

n  It is the cry of the human who needs God’s wonders and His salvation.

n  Therefore, the Book of Psalms is the STORY and ITS INTERPRETATION becoming into a PRAYER.

n  In this way, the Book of Psalms is the most unique of all the books in the Old Testament.

n  It is the book that teaches us to lift our hands in praise and thanksgiving to the wonder of God’s creation.

n  It teaches us as well to bend our knees in supplication when in need of His salvation.

THE EVOLUTION OF PSALMS

• The Evolution of the Psalms
• “The Living Psalms”
• C. Westermann, The Living Psalms (W.B.Eerdmans, 1989), pp.4-8.
• The Psalms emerged from Israel’s public worship.
• They were not first written then sung: rather, it was the other way round. Most of the Psalms were sung and prayed long before being written down.
• They were first committed to writing in the process of the growth of the whole collection. The collection of Psalms presupposes an already long, rich and varied life for them in oral tradition and in the context of worship.
• When we say that the Psalms were formed in Israel’s worship, we mean a worship that at the time was the heartbeat of the whole community and the center of Israel’s common life.
• In relation to the Psalms, what is the implication to this fact that worship was the center of Israel’s common life?
• If worship was the heart of the people’s common life, then the nation’s history must be reflected in the history of its worship, that is, the worship must contain elements that reveal the historical development of Israel as a people and in turn to some degree must be reflected in the Psalms.
• Now the most significant division in the Book of Psalms in general is between community Psalms and individual Psalms.
• The reason for this is that the history of the nation Israel was preceded by a history of families, whose traditions are preserved in the patriarchal narratives.
• The characteristic features of the patriarchal worship is that of the invocation of God in the Psalms, lament, praise, petition, expression of trust, making a vow. 
• These are all taken up and developed in the Book of Psalms in the form of individual Psalms, that is, Psalms from the area of personal and family life.
• The emergence of the nation brings with it the communal Psalms and from then on both types continue to exist side by side.
• In both, and in the relationship between them, developments occur, caused by historical developments  in Israel’s worship.
• The most important development after the settlement was the establishment of the monarchy. With it arrived the royal Psalms.
• After the end of the monarchy, a further development occurred: now the praise of God as king moved into the foreground (Psalms 47; 93-99) and the old royal Psalms were interpreted messianically.
• The Psalter also frequently reflects the profound change brought about the collapse of the monarchy and the Temple.
• Changes in the worship of the post-exilic community led to far-reaching changes in the Psalms.
• It is particularly noteworthy that communal psalms of narrative praise, like the victory songs, disappear almost entirely.
• The contrast now is no longer between Israel and her political enemies but between the pious and the godless.
• Thus, it is only in recognizing that worship is the unifying center of Israel’s common life that we can describe and understand the Psalms as originating from Israel’s public worship.
• It is not always possible to utter one’s plea to God in the sanctuary.
• It can happen outside the sanctuary, when the individual or community is confronted with an occasion of joy or of distress: the sick may pray on his bed, the prisoner prays in his cell, the man threatened by a storm prays on the ship (Ps 107), while the victory song rises from the battlefield and a thanksgiving to God is uttered when a child is born.
• Prayer in public worship would lose its force without these experiences outside the sanctuary: such prayer is only given life by the movements inwards from outside and back again into daily life.
• Within this movement, prayer in worship functions to bring together those many experiences of the need to invoke God and to give verbal expression to them in a way in which all the members of the community can join.
• The secret of the language of the Psalms lies in the fact that many people and many succeeding generations can recognize and utter it as their own prayer.
• That the Psalms are to be understood in the light of this movement to and from worship is indicated by the titles that were later added to the Psalms by those who collected them together, titles which ascribe the occasion of their composition to real-life situations, for example Psalm 3:1, ‘A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son’ or Psalm 102:1, ‘A Prayer of one afflicted, when he is faint and pours out his complaint before the Lord.’
• It is important then bear in mind that every particular Psalm must be read as the product of an evolutionary development, of which the final stage is its fixation in writing as part of the entire collection of the Psalter.
• In its earlier stages, the Psalm was the prayer of many different persons in diverse situations and its present form represents the collecting together in worship of these different voices.
• It received its liturgical shape only after many generations, during which it was transmitted in the worshipping center from parents to children for centuries.
• A vivid example of this process is Psalm 107, where various experiences of delivery from mortal dangers are brought together in a single Psalm, which thereby became a Psalm of the worshipping community.

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.

SACRAMENT OF MARRIAGE

• Marriage and Sacrament of Marriage

Michael lawler- dq

• Pre-note

1. Catholic teaches that Marriage is a SACRAMENT.
2. Two realities involved in marriage as sacrament: Marriage and the sacrament of marriage.
3. Love: common human reality of two realities.
4. Three things to consider this chapter: sacrament of marriage, marriage, and marital love.

• The sacrament of marriage

1. Early Scholastics defined sacrament as both a SIGN and a cause of GRACE. They looked upon marriage as a sign but not cause of grace (not listed among sacraments) because it involved SEXUAL INTERCOURSE which Augustine had thought was always SINFUL, even between husband and wife, except in the case when it was for the procreation of a child. Conjugal intercourse for the sake of offspring is not “sinful but sexual intercourse, even with one’s spouse to satisfy concupiscence is a venial sin. ”

2. For Augustine, it is not sexual intercourse ITSELF that is sinful but CONCUPISCENCE (the sexual appetite OUT OF CONTROL).

3. Peter Lombard (12^th century) defined sacrament in the categories of SIGN and CAUSE: “A sacrament, properly speaking, is a SIGN OF GRACE and the form of INVISIBLE GRACE in such a way that it is its IMAGE and its CAUSE.”

4. 13^TH century Dominicans, Albert the Great and his pupil, Thomas Aquinas, who securely established marriage among the sacraments of the Church.

                Albert the Great: “Marriage confers grace for doing good, not just any good but that specific good that a married person should do.”

                Thomas Aquinas: “Marriage, in so far as it is contracted in FAITH in Christ, confers grace to do these things which are required in marriage.” In his Contra Gentiles: “It is to be believed that through this sacrament (marriage) grace is given to the married.”

5. The first church document to list marriage as a sacrament was by the Council of Verona (1184) against the Cathari (preached that sexuality and marriage were sinful).

6. Council of Lyons (1274) to which Aquinas was traveling when he died, first listed marriage among seven sacraments as part of the formula for healing the great schism between East and west.

7. Council of Florence (1439): The seven sacraments both contain GRACE and confer GRACE ON THOSE WHO RECIEVEIT WOTHILY.

8.  Council of Trent (16^th century): Marriage is a SACRAMENT, that it CONTAINS and CONFERS GRACE, that is, indissoluble.

9. A marriage is a sacrament: it reveals and celebrates the intimate COMMUNION of life and love, and GRACE between God and God’s people and between Christ and Christ’s people, the Church.

• marriage

1. For a valid marriage, only one moment of the ritual radically counts, the solemn moment of giving CONSENT.
2. Ancient Roman: Mutual consent between the parties makes marriage.
3. Ancient Germanic: Sexual intercourse between the spouses makes a marriage.

4. Gratian (Master of the University of Bologna) proposed a compromise solution which combined both views: Consent initiates a marriage (ratum); subsequent sexual intercourse then completes or consummates it. This opinion which settled the debate and is today is still enshrined in CIC (Can 1061) that governs marriages in the Roman Catholic Church.

5. Consent initiates marriage and sexual intercourse then consummates it.

6. A sacramental marriage is not just a wedding to be celebrated (event) but it is also, and more critically, an EQUAL and LOVING PARTNERSHIP to be  lived for the whole life.

• Marital love

1. In contemporary American usage, love always means romantic love, usually a passionate feeling of affection for another person of the opposite sex. That is not entirely what love means. Feeling is frequently part of love but it is not always part of it, and it is certainly not all there is to love.

2. Love would end when the transient things that fuel romantic love end.

3. Marriages based on feeling-love would also end, as many of them indeed do. If love were merely FEELING, the love of neighbors and enemies commanded by Jesus would be impossible, for few of us can feel love  for some of our neighbors and even fewer for all of our enemies (Mt 22:39; 5:44).

4. Love that is STEADFAST and LASTING and that gives STABILITY to marriages is more than feeling, it is also WILLING or INTENDING. It wills the good of the beloved.

5. Love is FREE.  An ancient maxim : nihil amatum nisi praecognitum (nothing is loved that is not first known).

6. The first movement of love is a RESPONSE, a response to the knowledge of the other’s being, the other’s goodness, beauty, and lovableness.

7. To that extent that one is responsible, love is free. It is something to do as well as something that happens; it is action as well as passion.

8. As a freely willed act, love is a species of PROMISE or COMMITMENT, the giving of word to do something, namely, to will the good of another. The action in which commitment is expressed in the SYMBOL OF LOVE and the symbol of one’s intention to love for the whole life.

9. The symbol not only expresses to the one loved one’s intention for the whole life but it also confirms the intention. Both mutually commit to one another as lovers to make love permanent and to communicate it as permanent.

10. Love can intend to be indissoluble and can make it indissoluble, for love stretches out into the unknown future along with life.

11. The commitment to love is also a commitment is also a commitment to the principle of honor and to fidelity to that honor.

13. Mutual commitment of love between lovers creates between them an interpersonal relationship and a bond which is morally binding. That interpersonal bond can be further bound by further ritual: in Christian marriage, it can be bound by SACRAMENT and the GRACE OF GOD.

14. In Christian marriage, therefore, there are three bonds binding the spouses: the bond of love, the bond of legal marriage, and the bond of sacrament. None of these bonds occurs in any physical reality, they occur only, but really and ontologically in the INTERPERSONAL SPHERE OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT.

15. Togetherness is to be created in a marriage; the spouses have to become one coupled-We. Admired, valued, and cherished otherness, however, is also integral to true love and marriage. It is very coupled otherness, the marriage that is the communion between distinct I and a distinct Thou, with all its negative conflicted,  and sad moments as well as its positive, peaceful and happy moments.