Praying the Psalms

Yesterday, we received some unsettling news. The news itself is not relevant here, but the upshot was that all four of us sisters were surprised and upset. We went on about our business as usual yesterday, and were certainly subdued at evening prayer but carried on normally.

This morning at morning prayer, Joan was leading. She gave us the pages in our Christian Prayer books (the "Office") but before we began said, "Since I couldn't sleep last night, I got up and came here to the chapel and looked for a good reading to use this morning...." but as she said this we all looked at one another and soon we all confessed that we had not slept well and had been up doing various chores in the wee hours. And so we settled into the psalms of the day.

If you have a copy of Christian Prayer, look up Wednesday morning Week II. It starts with Psalm 77. Within two lines we all felt deeply connected to what we were reciting. By the third stanza, we actually had to stop because we had all started laughing at "You withheld sleep from my eyes...." It is good that we could laugh, and I doubt we could have done this except that we were in shared grief, shared distress. We did compose ourselves and carry on, but I knew that here was a clear example of the difference between saying the Psalms and praying the Psalms.

I used to wonder if I would keep up the practice of praying the Office if I ever lived alone, being someone to whom self-discipline is an eternal ideal to strive for. Turns out I did in fact stick to it. I lived alone in a small graduate apartment on the campus of the University of Dayton. In September of 2005 I watched in horror as my ancestral hometown of New Orleans was laid waste by Katrina. The levees had clearly giving way by Tuesday morning and the City was slowly filling up. But life in Dayton went on more or less the same until about Friday, when the national disaster finally breached the national consiousness. I felt so alone, and of course I could not even call my family, many of whom did in fact lose their homes.

On Friday morning of Week III, I found myself praying the Canticle of Jeremiah. I recommend it to your reading, and as you read it, imagine your own home town devastated overnight. But the thing is, I had imagined this before when I had reflected on this Psalm. But that day, I prayed the Canticle, and I wept my way through the lament the same way as did the one who wrote those words in the face of very real disaster, so long ago.