Praying the Psalms does more than enable worshippers to freely articulate their experience. Brueggemann and Patrick D. Miller suggest that the Psalms supervise the experience according to God’s standards that make it bearable, manageable, and, hopefully, meaningful in the community. The Psalms make our experience “formful just when it appeared to be formless and therefore deathly and destructive.”1
Praying the Psalms will sometimes reveal a dissonance that may exist between the emotions of the Psalms and the emotions of the worshiper. Imagine a worshiper who learns that he is dying of cancer. The lamenting words of Ps 22:1 will help him express his grief and sense of loneliness: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me? Why are You so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning?” However, he will also read in the same psalm, “I will declare Your name to my brethren; in the midst of the assembly I will praise You” (v. 22). The latter words may not coincide with his present experience, and they may even drive him to despair. Jacobson argues that pastors and theologians must learn to make fruitful use of this dissonance and help the worshiper resolve the spiritual discomfort by letting the Psalms introduce new cognitions, experiences, and attitudes to him.2 By giving us words to pray, the Psalms teach us that we pray first and later that we feel what we pray.3
When my husband and I lost our first child due to some complications at delivery, I was left without any spiritual oil in my reservoir. As I was lying alone in my room that Friday evening, I reached for my Bible to begin the Sabbath. I could not pray. I had no words to say. The Bible opened at the place where the marker was placed the day before. This was Isa 49, that is, the song of Restoration of Zion. I began reading mechanically. It seemed as if each word of the song was meant to pierce my heart: “Sing, O heavens! Be joyful, O earth! And break out in singing, O mountains! For the LORD has comforted His people, and will have mercy on His afflicted” (v. 13). But when I read v. 14, I felt that my lost words came back to me, and I read over and over again: “But Zion said: ‘The Lord has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me.’“ These words became my words. They expressed everything that was in my heart. These were the only words spoken by Zion in the song. The Lord continues the song by answering Zion: “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!” (v. 15, NIV). I felt then that God was talking to me. I was still sad and desperate, but not forsaken and forgotten anymore.
One of my students copied Ps 42 on a beautifully decorated scroll and sent it to me in the hospital. “My tears have been my food day and night … Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance” (vv. 3, 5). These words filled me with hope—that tears would be exchanged for praise one day in the future. Isaiah 49 and Ps 42 became my prayers at the time when I had no words of my own. Over the days and weeks, I began to feel and really mean the praise and hope expressed in these two songs. I still pray them when I wish to express special thanks to God.
Praying the Psalms supervises our experience by taking the worshiper to new spiritual horizons. The Psalms let worshipers express their feelings and understanding, but they are not left psychologically or spiritually where they presently are. The worshipers are led to abandon their burdens of pain, disappointment, hatred, anger, and despair before God and to adopt a new understanding and eventually healing. The movement from lament to praise observed in most psalms of lament is typical of the psalm genre, but it is also suggestive of the spiritual transformation that the believers experience when they receives divine grace and comfort in prayer (Pss 13, 22, 77).4
In the same way, praying the Psalms provides a joyful, grateful heart with inspired ways to experience new dimensions of praise and thanksgiving. The Psalms can lead worshipers to relate, for example, their experience of God’s deliverance to other aspects of their faith in God. People who pray with Ps 28 to express their praise to God for answering their prayers (vv. 6-8) are led to relate God’s present deliverance to God’s judgment of the wicked and His deliverance of the whole people of God in the future (vv. 1-5, 9). In this way, the praying of Ps 28 guides worshippers to look beyond their personal interests, and seek the deliverance of the whole people of God and cessation of all evil in the world.
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1 Walter Brueggemann and Patrick D. Miller, The Psalms and the Life of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 86.
2 Jacobson, “Burning Our Lamps with Borrowed Oil,” 92-93.
3 Ari L. Goldman, Being Jewish: The Spiritual and Cultural Practice of Judaism Today (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 209.
4 Brueggemann describes this movement in our lives of faith with God in terms of (1) being securely oriented, (2) being painfully disoriented, and (3) being surprisingly reoriented. Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms, 1-15.