A THEOLOGICAL MEDITATION · THE BACKBONE OF ALL CHRISTIAN PRAYER
The Psalter
The 150 Psalms · The Prayer Book of Our Lord · The Spine of the Daily Office
Psalter — SAWL-ter · Coverdale — KUV-er-dayl (BCP Psalter translator) · Athanasius — ath-ah-NAY-zhus (Letter to Marcellinus) · Benedictine — ben-eh-DIK-tin · My God, my God — Psalm 22:1, spoken from the cross
O Lord, open thou our lips: and our mouth shall shew forth thy praise. · As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
The Psalter (SAWL-ter) is the spine of the entire archive. Every service in this collection — Lauds and Compline, every collect, every antiphon, every versicle and response — draws its language from the one hundred and fifty psalms. The words that open the Lauds service — O Lord, open thou our lips — are Psalm 51:15. The words that close the Compline — into thy hands I commend my spirit — are Psalm 31:5. The Lord’s own last words from the cross — My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me — are Psalm 22:1. The Psalter is not merely the background music of the Christian liturgy; it is the prayer book of Jesus Christ himself. He prayed these psalms in the synagogue at Nazareth and in the Temple at Jerusalem; he sang them at the Last Supper with his disciples; he died with their words on his lips. To pray the Psalter is to enter the prayer life of the incarnate Son of God.
Athanasius (ath-ah-NAY-zhus), whose meditation is among the greatest in the Patristic series, wrote a letter to his friend Marcellinus explaining why the Psalms are unlike any other book of scripture: in the other books, he says, one reads about holy men and women and what they did; in the Psalms one finds the movements of the soul itself — its exaltation and its desolation, its confidence and its terror, its love and its anger and its grief — laid out with perfect transparency before God. The Psalms encompass the whole of human life, all its moods and movements; and the one who takes it up and reads it is taking up a mirror in which to see himself, and words in which to offer everything he sees. This is why the great tradition of Psalmody is inseparable from the great tradition of prayer: because the Psalms do not give the soul words to say instead of its own but words in which to say exactly what it is. Psalm 22 gives the desolate soul the cry of dereliction; Psalm 23 gives the confident soul the image of divine care; Psalm 51 gives the penitent the words that David found after his worst sin and that the Church has placed at the threshold of every Lent.
The Rule of St Benedict prescribed the singing of the entire Psalter every week — all one hundred and fifty psalms in seven days, distributed through the eight canonical hours — and this Benedictine (ben-eh-DIK-tin) practice shaped the Western liturgical tradition for a thousand years before Cranmer adapted it for the BCP Daily Office. Cranmer distributed the Psalter over a month rather than a week, making it accessible to the parish priest and the devout layperson; but the principle was the same — the entire Psalter prayed through in its cycle, the whole range of human experience before God traversed repeatedly, the prayer of Christ and the prayer of the Church kept in permanent motion. Miles Coverdale’s (KUV-er-dayl) translation, preserved in the BCP against all subsequent revisions of the Bible text, has a quality of English prose that has never been replaced: The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing — God is our hope and strength, a very present help in trouble — I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills: from whence cometh my help? These sentences carry the weight of five centuries of prayer.
The archive began with the Name and ends with the Psalter — and the ending is entirely right, because the Name is prayed in the Psalms. The one hundred and fiftieth psalm — the doxological conclusion of the whole Psalter — is a single sustained exclamation of praise, expanding outward from the sanctuary to the firmament to every instrument of music to every thing that hath breath: Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Every meditation in this archive has been an act of praise. Every saint named and honoured has been named in praise of the God who made them and redeemed them and kept them and will raise them. The Psalter is where all of it comes from and where all of it returns: the prayer of the whole human being, in its joy and its desolation and its penitence and its confidence, before the God who is its shepherd and its rock and its salvation.
O Lord, who by thy Holy Spirit didst inspire the psalmists to give the whole human soul a voice before thee; Grant that we, praying the Psalter as thy Son prayed it, may find in its one hundred and fifty songs every condition of our life already spoken, every need already named, and every praise already sung; that with every thing that hath breath we may praise thee, the Lord our God, who liveth and reigneth, world without end.
Amen.