The Poetry of Praise
What the Psalms are teaching me about worship and prayer
As I began to work on this post, I intended to write a very academic post about Psalms of praise—but I find I’m reflecting more on how the Psalms have taught me to worship. It’s easy to categorize the Psalms into individual and communal laments, individual and communal praises, etc, but truthfully, each psalm contains elements of both. Lament and praise go hand in hand. They are two sides of the same coin, in a kind of rhythm with one another, often experienced simultaneously, and they are both worshipful. They both bring glory to God.
It’s funny—I’ve been immersed in the Psalms for most of 2019, and I’m only just beginning to scratch the surface of their wealth. The Spirit of God has done something in me through the Psalms. Walter Brueggeman writes about the movements of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation throughout our spiritual journeys, "the surprising movement from disorientation to a new orientation that is quite unlike the old status quo. This is not an automatic movement that can be presumed upon or predicted. Nor is it a return to the old form, a return to normalcy as though nothing had happened. It is rather ‘all things new.’ And when it happens, it is always a surprise, always a gift of graciousness, and always an experience that evokes gratitude.” (10)
This surprising gift has been my experience over the course of months in the Psalms, and I thought I’d share a few things I’m learning with you.
SLOWING
God keeps teaching me that prayer isn’t just about me spouting off all my thoughts and emotions to Him. He hears me, to be sure, and He wants me to share these things with Him, but prayer is also about slowing down enough to hear Him. The most significant moments of prayer between me and God have often begun with slowing, with silence, with listening. My own thoughts and emotions can be pretty obnoxious, if I’m being honest, and sometimes I just need to be still (see Psalm 46).
Eugene Peterson’s reflections on the Psalms have, for lack of better phrasing, wrecked me. If I can recommend any book on the Psalms, it would be Answering God, or even his little devotional, Praying with the Psalms. I’ve learned so much from his sweet soul's deep connection to God’s Spirit and word. In Answering God, he reminds us that the psalms are poetry, and reading poetry can’t be hurried. It starts with silence, and he writes this: "we are merely impatient with silence. Mobs of words run out of our mouths, nonstop, trampling the grassy and sacred silence. We only stop when breathless. Why do we talk so much? Why do we talk so fast? Hurry is a form of violence practiced on time. But time is sacred. The purpose of language is not to murder the silence but to enter it, cautiously and reverently. Silence is not what is left over when there is nothing more to say but the aspect of time that gives meaning to sound. The poem restores silence to language so that words, organic and living, once again are given time to pulse and breathe.” (60-61)
I remember Bryan read those words to me when we was reading Answering God several months ago, and they stung. I don’t want my prayers to be violently hurried. I want to come to God, perhaps with caution, as he says, but also with reverence and an expectation that He’ll breathe new life into me.
"We cannot breathe out what we have not first breathed in. The breath that God breathes into us in daily pentecosts, is breathed out in our prayers, ’telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God’ (Acts 2:11). We can, of course, pray in a frenzy, thrashing about. Much prayer necessarily begins that way, but we pray better, and best, when we let the rhythms of the creating word of God work themselves into the rhythms of our living, and then find expression in the psalmic rhythm of prayer.” (Answering God, 60)
REMEMBERING
The Psalms have been God’s breath in me these last several months, and I find the more I allow them to show me how to pray, the more I learn to hope.
For me, hoping begins with remembering. If I’m lost in anxiety or uncertainty, recalling to mind the times when God has shown Himself faithful is like a balm. Remembering God can heal me. I think back to experiences of deep pain or loss, and immediately I also remember God showing up. The very first time I can remember hearing God’s voice was on the day my dad passed away when I was 11 years old, and God whispered that He’d care for me and be my Father. I was just 11 years old, and since then the words of Psalm 68:5 have reminded me: “A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.”
The beautiful thing about remembering is that it isn’t just rooted in the past, though; it "is vigorously present tense, selecting out of the storehouses of the past, retrieving and arranging images and insights, and then hammering them together for use in the present moment” (Answering God, 117). Somehow, memories take on a new life. Neurological studies have actually found that sharing memories—including traumatic ones—with a trusted person actually start to form new neural pathways in our brains and make way for healing. (For more on this fascinating topic, check out Curt Thompson’s Anatomy of the Soul.)
What I love about the psalms of praise is that they declare truths about God that aren’t always evident. They invite us to hope for what will be, and call us to trust in the God who is in the process of making all things new, even if we can’t yet see it. Brueggeman writes, “The key assertion of these [psalms of celebration] that ‘Yahweh is king,’ strikes one as ludicrous in our world, because most of the evidence in [the news] suggests God is not in power. If the words must be descriptive, then such a claim is deceptive, for God manifestly is not king. But if the words are evocative of a new reality yet to come into being, then the words have a powerful function. And indeed, sometimes in a world where the circumstances are hopeless, then a promissory word is all that stands between us and chaos. Then it is important to pray and speak and sing and share that word against all that data…Thus the psalms of complaint are acts of painful relinquishment, so celebration psalms are acts of radical hope” (Praying the Psalms, 22-23).
I shared in a previous post on lament that Bryan and I have been in a season of longing and waiting (perhaps you can guess what for), and hope has been a tricky thing for me. Waiting for God really sucks sometimes. But somehow, in the last few months of soaking in the hopeful words of the Psalms, I’m sensing God’s nearness in the midst of my waiting like never before. In previous seasons of waiting, God felt distant. Now, He feels so very near to me. Perhaps it’s because I’ve felt a new freedom to lament to Him with relentless honesty. And He’s responding by filling me with relentless hope.
COMMUNING
I’ve thought so often of prayer as being a solitary activity, just between me and God. And that’s certainly true! The Psalms are so personal. But experiencing the breadth of beauty and mystery of the Psalms over the last year has been enriched and brought to life in community over the last year.
We learn to pray through the liturgy, or “the work of the people,” of our communities. I can’t learn the language of prayer in isolation. Good ol’ Eugene Peterson does it again when he writes, “The assumption that prayer is what we do when we are alone—the solitary soul before God—is an egregious, and distressingly persistent, error. We imagine a lonely shepherd on the hills composing lyrics to the glory of God. We imagine a beleaguered soul sinking in a swamp of trouble calling for help. But our imaginations betray us. We are part of something before we are anything, and never more so than when we pray. Prayer begins in community” (Answering God, 84).
Our church family has spent the last six weeks in the Psalms, through sermons and small groups. In the spring, a small group of us actually wrote our own small group curriculum for the series on the Psalms, which is what inspired me to do a series on the Psalms for CURATE as well! The dozen or so of us on the writing team wrote our own psalms and shared them with one another, and I’ll never forget how vulnerable and generous that experience was. I learned so much about prayer from these friends. I also recently participated in a women’s retreat on Psalm 27, and the insights and prayers of the other women in attendance have stayed with me for weeks.
Unfortunately, I think many of us have been taught that praying the prayers of others isn't as authentic as praying in our own words. I’ve been learning through the Psalms how completely untrue that is! I need the prayers of the psalmists and those in my community to teach me how to be a person of prayer. I need to let go of my need to be in control and let go of my pride and egotism, especially when in a posture of prayer and worship. The liturgy of community is what Eugene Peterson calls "the center in which we learn to pray,” where we learn the “unselfing of prayer” and from which the "lines of praying radiate and lead us outwards. From this center we go to our closets or the mountains, into the streets and the markets, and continue our praying. But it is essential to understand that prayer goes from the center outwards” (Answering God, 86).
I’ve been wading into the depths of the psalms for most of the year, and in some moments, I’ve felt neck-deep in them, immersed in their imagery and humanity and honesty. Other times, I feel I’ve barely dipped my toes in. But all along the way, I’ve learned to slow down enough to hear God’s sweet invitations to be with Him, to sit and listen to Him, to cry out to Him, to praise Him, to lament with Him.
And I’m being formed. I’m being shaped. I’m being made new. I’m different than I was before I started my immersion in the Psalms. It’s as though something new has been sparked to life in me. I hope and pray the Spirit of God continues to breathe on this little spark of the Psalms, as His word comes alive in me and I spend my life learning how to pray these words back to Him.
May we together never reach the end of Him, and spend a lifetime—and indeed an eternity!—lost in wonder and mystery of our God.
As Thanksgiving approaches, I’ll leave you with the words of Psalm 100:
Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth.
Worship the LORD with gladness;
Come before him with joyful songs.
Know that the LORD is God.
It is He who made us, and we are his;
We are his people, the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise;
Give thanks to him and praise his name.
For the LORD is good and his love endures forever;
His faithfulness continues through all generations.
Recommend Reading on the Psalms
Praying the Psalms: Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit, Walter Brueggeman
Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, Eugene Peterson (BUY THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW!!!)
Praying with the Psalms: A Year of Daily Prayers and Reflections on the Words of David, Eugene Peterson