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Look toward Him and be radiant. Psalm 34
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In the days of the Desert Fathers, the elderly Abba Zosima visited a monastery near the Jordan River. He arrived shortly before Lent, and he soon discovered that on Ash Wednesday almost all the able-bodied monks left their cells and walked into the desert chanting Psalm 27:
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The Lord is my light and my help; Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; before whom shall I shrink?
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Abba Zosima decided to join the departing monks. He left his visitor’s cell and fell in with them.
Before long, one-by-one, the monks veered away from the group, each searching out his individual desert space in which to pray and fast in solitude throughout the six weeks of Lent.
Abba Zosima, too, found for himself an uninhabited, heat-shimmering expanse of wasteland. He walked straight into it, his sandaled feet leaving fleeting footprints in the sand. As he walked, he broke his solitary journey at regular intervals to rest and chant the psalms while standing and kneeling in meditation and prayer.
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Since their first inspired origins, the psalms have been used as a way to reach out to God. A few more examples follow to illustrate their importance in the lives of Christians throughout history.
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There, in the vast desert, populated by an ocean of sand dunes and skittering lizards, Abba Zosima suddenly encountered a woman.
She was clothed only in her own long dark hair that looked as though it had never been cut. Mary of Egypt, as she later became known, had no possessions, not even a Bible.
“I am fed and clothed,” she told Abba Zosima, “by the all-powerful Word of God, the Lord of all.”
“And so you have read the psalms and other books?” Abba Zosima asked.
“The Word of God which is alive and active,” replied the illiterate Mary, “teaches a person knowledge.”
Whether, as tradition has it, the angels taught Mary the Psalter, or whether the Lord himself blessed her with directly infused knowledge, we know through Abba Zosima that she spent forty years in the desert, repenting of her sins, meditating on passages of Scripture, and praising God in the psalms.
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Early in the twelfth century, a young aristocrat named Norbert became a deacon only to acquire a position at court.
As he was riding his horse one day, lightning flashed, startling the horse. It reared, and threw Norbert from his saddle. Lying unconscious on the ground, Norbert heard Jesus say to him, Turn away from evil, and do good. Seek peace, and pursue it.
These words, which the Lord quoted to him from Psalm 34, changed Norbert’s life. He became a missionary preacher in France and founded the Norbertine community of priests. Finally, he became an archbishop in Germany, and reformed the clergy.
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Later, in the sixteenth century, in Rome, St. Philip Neri, first as a layman and later as a priest, frequently made a twelve-mile walking pilgrimage to “the seven churches of Rome (St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s, San Sebastiano, the Lateran, Santo Crocci, San Lorenzo, and Santa Maria Maggiori).”
At first, he made these pilgrimages alone, praying psalms and singing hymns. Observers often laughed at the seemingly eccentric wanderer. But, as time went by, the mockers grew fewer, and, becoming attracted by the light of his holiness, the pilgrimage participants grew in numbers.
Eventually, as many as two thousand people joined St. Philip on his day-long trek of reciting psalms and singing hymns at the seven churches.
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In the early twentieth century, in Lebanon, when Christians ordered their days according to the liturgical calendar, the children learned their letters by reading the Psalter. When a child mastered his reading to the satisfaction of the adults in his life, he was seated on a donkey and paraded proudly through the village streets.
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The desert monks, Mary of Egypt, Saint Norbert, Saint Philip Neri, and the Lebanese Christians knew that the words of the psalms carry within them a key to God’s heart.
The Church knew it, too, and it has given them a major role in its prayer. In fact, specific psalms are prayed throughout the whole Church every day in the Divine Office, the official prayer of the Church.
The laity are encouraged to pray the Office and members of religious orders pray at least part of it every day. Priests and members of many, perhaps most, contemplative orders, pray it in full daily—the contemplative communities, seven times per day.
Authored by the Holy Spirit, who inspired King David and the other psalmists, these songs of praise and entreaty express the whole range of human experience.
They pour out expressions of sorrow, joy, gratitude, fear, loss, distress and triumph, hope, confusion and confidence, anger, desperation, trust and, especially, praise of God and thanksgiving for his loving care for us, his children.
Thomas Merton said, “Nowhere can we be more certain that we are praying with the Holy Spirit than when we are praying with the psalms.”*
Our Lady, too, prayed the psalms. Her Magnificat flows from psalms 107, 138, and 147:
Our Lord is great and almighty; his wisdom can never be measured.
The Lord raises the lowly; He humbles the wicked to the dust (Psalm 147).
He fills the hungry with good things (Psalm 107).
The Lord is high, yet he looks on the lowly, and the haughty he knows from afar (Psalm 138).
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In the prayers of the Church, the psalms, even those of lamentations, end with the praise of God:
“Glory to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever.”
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Jesus himself, the fulfillment of the longing expressed in so many of the psalms, prayed them throughout his life.
“God knew from the beginning that the prayers of the psalms would only receive the full meaning latent in them when the Word became flesh and he himself spoke them.”** One prophetic psalm in which the meaning reached its fullness of expression in Jesus is Psalm 34:
Many are the trials of the just man, but from them all the Lord will rescue him. He will keep guard over all his bones; not one of his bones will be broken.” (this last line, also see John 19:36.)
Another is Psalm 22 which Christ prayed in anguish from the Cross:
My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me? (Mt 22: 1)
And when the Lord then commended his Spirit to the Father, He prayed, with Psalm 31:
“Into Your hands I commend my spirit.” (Luke 23: 46)
The Lord not only called upon the psalms during his greatest trial, he was intimately connected with them at all times. When he threw the money changers out of the temple, his disciples recalled that it is written:
Zeal for your house will consume me (John 21: 17 and Psalm 69: 9).
And when the chief priests and the teachers of the law complained about the children shouting in the temple area, Hosanna to the Son of David, Jesus responded to these elders,
Have you never read, “From the lips of children and of babes, You have found praise?” (Mt 21: 15-16) (Psalm 8: 2)
After his resurrection, the Lord Jesus said to his apostles, “This is what I told you while I still walked in your company; how all that was written of me in the Law of Moses, and in the prophets and in the psalms, must be fulfilled” (Luke 24: 44).
When we, in our own prayer, turn to the psalms, they draw us out of our own self-interests and into praise of the One who created us and loves us into being.
I will bless the Lord at all times,
His praise always on my lips” (Psalm 34: 1).
It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to make music to your Name, O Most High (Psalm 92:1).
How great is your Name, O Lord our God, through all the earth! (Psalm 8: 1)
Even in the midst of suffering, the psalms call us to express awe and wonder at the true greatness of God. In the psalms, the Holy Spirit consoles, chastises, instructs and encourages us. It becomes clear over and over again that he directs and guides us along the path that leads us, with Christ, to union with the Father.
The Lord is my Shepherd. . . .
He guides me along the right path (Psalm 23).
I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go. Be not like horse and mule, unintelligent, needing bridle and bit, else they will not approach you.(Psalm 32: 8-9)
Instruct me, Lord, in your way; on an even path, lead me.” (Psalm 27:11)
Praying the psalms during hard times helps keep us rooted in the heart of God, steadfast along the journey of life in faith.
The psalms also provide us with a powerful vehicle of intercession. Although I might be experiencing a time of peace and joy, I can pray for and identify with another’s pain in praying psalms like 130:
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. O, let your ear be attentive to the voice of my pleading (1-2).
In this way, we bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, which is love (Cf: Galatians 6:2).
It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to make music to your name, O Most High. (Psalm 92:1)
As Saint Ambrose, bishop, says, “A psalm is a blessing on the lips of the people.”
When we pray the psalms with Jesus, knowing we are praying the words authored by the Holy Spirit, can they do anything but touch the heart of the Father?
* Praying the Psalms, Thomas Merton, Liturgical Press, (1956)
**Wilfrid Stinissen, Nourished by the Word: Reading the Bible Contemplatively, Liguori, (1999)
