Living with the Psalms - Part 3

As I prepare for the sabbatical, I've started to surround myself with the psalms -- in every available format. They are starting to work on me.

I found a four-CD set of the psalms on Naxos, my favorite cheap label. They are recitations from the KJV. I've played them continuously in the car and put them on the MP3 player. It's astonishing how they begin to shape your world.

As my wife and I were getting ready for work last week, she mentioned that she had been going through a bumpy period in her prayer life. I blurted out (as I'm prone to do) that my prayer life was beginning to change. For now, I'm praying less with my own words, and more with the words given to me by the psalter. My prayer is being shaped by the vocabulary of Israel's faith.

This is a new step for me. Much of my piety has been shaped by the quasi-evangelicalism in America, where prayer is frequently a lot of babbling about what we want God to do. Consequently, some of us complain that we don't receive what we want. Or we stop praying when life doesn't proceed as we wish.

Those who pray the psalms can bring their whole life before God. These are covenantal prayers, offered by those already in relationship to God. There's nothing to prove, and outrageous petitions can be made ("smite my enemies" is a current favorite) because God's covenant is never really at risk.