The Psalms: Praying as Jesus Prayed

The Psalms: Praying as Jesus Prayed

Fr Daniel Richards

It’s been said that the crown of literature is poetry, and so perhaps we could say the crown of Sacred Scripture, if there is one, is the Book of Psalms…. At their heart the Psalms are poetry: the lyrical expression of human experience. And while it might not appear at first glance to be the manliest of literary styles, poetry is without doubt one of the most human of literary styles. What essays and books fail to capture the poet can say in a few short lines.
Whether joy or sadness, anger or love, peace or despair, no human emotion is beyond the capture of an impassioned writer’s pen, and none are without their own representation in the Book of Psalms. It’s difficult to find greater praise in all of Scripture for God’s steadfast love than in the words of Psalm 59: “I will sing of your might; I will sing aloud of your mercy in the morning. For you have been to me a fortress and a refuge in the day of my distress.” Or contrast the joy of one delivered from death in Psalm 30: “His anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may last for the night, but joy comes with the morning” with the almost complete despair of Psalm 88: “Your wrath has swept over me; your dread assaults destroy me. Friend and neighbor you have taken away; my one companion is darkness.”
In themselves the Psalms say it all, and they do so in a surprisingly modern way. Rather than forcing human emotion and experience into an ideal form so that they can become worthy of God, the Psalms offer pure and unadulterated humanity, which is, ironically, quite impure and thoroughly adulterated, as an act of worship to God. And that is the true purpose of the Psalms, and of prayer in general. It isn’t about self-awareness, or self-actualization, or self-anything. In the same way that being in a relationship isn’t primarily about making ourselves feel better, but about expressing love for another person, prayer actually draws us out of ourselves and moves us toward God….
The Psalms aren’t a relic of the past, an example of how one person spoke to God. They’re meant to become our prayer, to teach us how to pray. Jesus himself offered the perfect example of this in his own life. He would have prayed the Psalms religiously, as any faithful Jew would have done. In doing so he made them his own prayer, taking on the voice of the Psalmist and embodying their meaning in his own life. The most obvious example is the Psalm he recited while dying on the Cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Jesus wasn’t despairing, and he certainly understood that God the Father would never truly forsake him, but that didn’t prevent him from experiencing the full pain—the very human suffering—of rejection and hatred. In the Psalms he found the words to express that, and by doing so he transformed them into something new.

                                                                                                               From www.thosecatholicmen.com (2013)