Phyllis Tickle Responds
The psalms are often filled with such raw emotion, including emotion that we might not easily identify with on any given day. As a life-long pray-er of the psalms, how do you connect with the emotional undercurrent of the psalms?...that is, connect it with your own emotional experience?
I have pondered this question for several days before actually attempting an answer. My delay has been due, not to any objective hesitancy, but to a kind of remembered and poignant empathy with the questioner.
I am seventy years old, fully mature by anyone's definition; and by now I have managed to experience almost the entire range of normal human emotions as well, probably, as a few of the patholigical ones. I can remember in my youth, however, and even for me as a young matron, that many of the psalms seemed infinitely wearisome at times. At other times, they simply appeared so removed in their circumstantial references from my own situation as to seem lacking in any kind of pertinence or immediacy. While I could soar with the beauty of, "Lift up your heads, O, ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors; and while I could share the yearning of "How can we sing your song in a foreign land, O Jerusalem," I could not connect with......
Ah, here is the problem. I can not remember now what I could not connect with.
Recalling with great clarity the tedium and restlessness with which some of the psalms once afflicted me, I go to my psalter, I turn its pages, I look for the former offenders, and I fail. Instead, even as I mouth the words softly to myself, my years rise up around me like the everlasting hills of the book itself, and I am held comfortable and comforted in the valley of them.
When, in decades gone by, I would complain from time to time about the psalms in corporate worship as well as in private devotion, some older Christian would invariably say, "Keep at it. You'll get use to them." What no one ever said to me, so far as I can remember now, was, "Keep at it. With luck, you'll grow up to them." The latter, not the former, is the truth of the thing.
Words are like living stones. All the mouths that speak them, all the hands that copy and re-copy them, all the hearts that feel them add to their patina. In our youth, we find the rock easier to grasp, more absorbing in its textures, more delightful to hurl and skip; but in time, we find the patina and all the colors and images it reflects and reveals to be more reassuring, more constant, and more inviting of engagement...or so it seems to me now.
...all of which is, I fear, not to have answered the question at all, but merely to have attested to its mercurial legitimacy. I can only hope that that will be enough.
Phyllis Tickle
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