I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, “An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul,” for there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror. Or rather, the Holy Spirit has here drawn to the life all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated. … Genuine and earnest prayer proceeds first from a sense of our need, and next, from faith in the promises of God … In a word, whatever may serve to encourage us when we are about to pray to God, is taught us in this book.
— John Calvin, introduction to his commentary on the Psalms
When I had been pastoring for about a decade, a member of the church said to me, “You’ve taught me how to pray.”
It’s one of those comments pastors long to hear and I was so grateful that she’d said it. But as I thought about it afterward, it struck me that I hardly ever preached on prayer as its own topic. So, how had I taught her to pray?
The best answer I could come up with was that I’d introduced her to the Psalms.
When I first became a pastor, we would pull a few nice-sounding verses from a psalm and use them as a call to worship. It was a happy liturgy. But after worshiping with a church in Mexico which used entire psalms, not just greatest hits snippets, I followed suit.
Now, the thing the snippet approach had going for it was it avoided all of the harsh and nasty sounding parts scattered rather liberally throughout the Psalter. And by using entire Psalms, I was now going to put the congregation I was serving through some awkward moments as they recited things like Psalm 118’s “I flick off my enemies like flies” and “Hemmed in by barbarians, in God’s name I rubbed their faces in the dirt.”
So, I’d take a moment to introduce whatever psalm we would be reciting together, explaining how it shapes our praying, saying something like this:
“Today’s psalm will have some exquisite expressions of love and praise for God, but it’s also going to take us into some dark places, with some gnarly requests for God to bash other people. Now, you may not feel like bashing anyone today — and that’s great! — but I’m guessing at some point in time in the not too distant future, you’ll be glad to have some divine bashings handed out to some well-deserving recipients. It’s at those times this psalm will come in handy. It’s not that God will answer your honest expression of anger with a ‘Yes! I’ll be glad to bash him. In fact, I was just waiting for you to ask. Let the bashings begin!’ No, it’s more important that we all learn how to express these feelings in prayer in order to give our feelings over to God instead of bottling them up and hitting someone with a bashing bat sometime down the road.”
And so, we engaged with the gnarly on many, many Sundays.
Along with weekly Psalm readings, I would also preach Psalms each summer. It’s always been my preference to preach through books of the Bible instead of preaching topically or by a lectionary. Those have their place, I just prefer lectio continua instead. But because of the hit and miss attendance caused by summer vacations, it’s a terrible time to do a book series … unless it’s the Psalms. Since each psalm is self-contained, people can take their trips and miss individual psalms while still having a sense of being a part of a larger series.
In fact, I began asking our groups within the church to pick psalms they wanted me to preach on. This gave them an extra incentive to attend and listen well on the Sunday I preached from their chosen psalm.
All that to say, I believe it’s the combination of weekly psalms providing a liturgical foundation for worship and preached psalms in the summers which taught this woman how to pray.
I know the Psalms have been instrumental in giving a wider range and a deeper expression to my own praying.
Most of us say pretty much the same thing every time we pray. And I’m not just talking about the bland and thoughtless prayers we pray before meals. (It’s a good thing the food we eat is more flavorful than the prayers we offer before eating it. What if there were a correlation between our enjoyment of what we eat and our thankfulness in prayers before meals?) It’s our regular times of prayer that I’m thinking of. Our most basic prayers are: Help! Please! Thanks! Sorry! I love you! And pretty much in that order. And many of us don’t bring much more depth to those prayers than that.
What I find helpful about the Psalms is that they surprise me. I rarely get what I’m expecting, and I write that after several decades of using the Psalms as a companion for prayer. Confession of sin will lead to public witness in one psalm. Grief will lead to prayers for the poor in another. Sickness will lead to prayers of condemnation on slandering friends. A request for a song will lead to imagining babies getting smashed on rocks. Yep. All of those are in there.
The Psalms take me on an emotional and prayerful journey I would never have expected. I discover things about God and about myself I had no idea I’d find.
But that doesn’t mean the Psalms are haphazard. They’re not. As I’ve spent time with them, I’ve seen the logic in the praying. So, instead of falling back into my old ruts in prayer, the Psalms take me down roads I would never have travelled otherwise. And in the process, I learn that this country of creation and salvation which God has opened up for us and mapped out in the Scriptures is much bigger and more accessible than I had realized.
The Psalms are tour guides to the great country of God which we discover in our praying. They range widely but never falsely.
That doesn’t mean we’ll always enjoy each step of the journey. The Psalms can be painful and even unsavory companions at times. But they are faithful and honest, showing us how to be the same.
There is plenty of dishonesty in our praying. We can be dishonest about how we’re really feeling, avoiding our unpleasant emotions and sanitizing our prayers. Be we can also be dishonest by only praying our unhappinesses and undercutting our praise. The Psalms refuse to dwell on either end of the spectrum, determinedly praying it all.
Calvin was right. The Psalms are an anatomy of all parts of the soul. We see ourselves in all of our glory and in all of our meanness in the mirror of their prayers and proverbs and songs. The honesty they require of us as we pray along with them is deeper and more real than the so-called authenticity our culture claims for itself.
This bare-hearted honesty is essential for any true biblical spirituality.
But the Psalms don’t just let us spew our emotions, they teach us how to feel and how to offer those feelings to God.
James Houston, founder of Regent College and a wise guide into spiritual theology, pointed out, “Our culture spends us to school for years and years to teach us how to think. But who teaches us how to feel?”
He said those words before the term “emotional intelligence” was coined. But I think he’d agree that the Western world is populated by the emotionally stupid. We need to be schooled in both exploring and submitting our emotions before God in prayer. Rather than merely unleashing our emotions, the Psalms teach us how to offer them to God, how to submit them to Scripture, how to let them go, and how to see them in light of what God is doing in the world.
As such, the Psalms aren’t just an anatomy of the soul, giving us textbook knowledge. They are a user’s guide. They are both textbook and workbook at the same time. For unlike the rest of the Scriptures, the Psalms encourage improvisation. They encourage us to modify the language, to add our own circumstances, to engage in all kinds of trial and error.
So, try them out. Make friends with them. Read and reread and reread them over and over again. They are key to any robust spirituality.