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In her book, The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris reflects on her two nine-month stays at a Benedictine monastery where the monks would engage in the practice of lectio continua--reading through entire books of scripture, a section at a time, during morning and evening prayer. Norris realized that she suffered from a long-held notion that she had to be dressed up, both outwardly and inwardly, in order to meet God—that she need be a firm and even cheerful believer before she dare show her face in “His” church. She had set an impossible standard, convincing herself that religion wasn’t worth exploring because she couldn’t “do it right.” She found that, when going to church several times a day at the monastery, she simply could not sustain her usual polished and perfected presentation. And so she forced herself to sing, even when irritable and slumped in the pew, wearing something retrieved from the dirty clothes hamper. To her surprise, she found that the liturgy, and the psalms in particular, did not ask her to deny her true feelings, but, in fact, coaxed them to the surface “right in front of God and everyone.” In Jungian psychology, we are taught that the very feelings and parts of ourselves that we find reprehensible and attempt to deny, hold some essential ingredient to our wholeness. The less we are aware of this “shadow” side, the more dense it is. The more dissociated it is from our conscious life, the more we compensate by projecting our limitations and fears outward onto others. Our dark underbelly, instead of being suppressed, longs to be exposed, healed and loved into fullness. Jesus’ parables teach us of the potential of things hidden—the small and the fragile. But there is also the transforming invitation to sow and leaven all that we are, not just the sanitized and presentable parts. Jesuit, John Kavanaugh, asks, “Could we believe that the promise God wove into our very souls might give birth to something big? Could we hope that something so small and fragile in us would someday walk free and upright and joyous?” In the following reflection adapted from David Miller’s Psalms and Sighs, it is apparent how the Psalmists insist that we bring it all to Him—the entire mess—the rage, the misery, the joy, the exhilaration, the hope, the confusion, the fear, the shame. . .and how, as St. Paul proclaims in the Letter to the Romans, “Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings. . .” “Wednesday, 4:55 p.m., prayerbook in hand, I head to the abbey chapel. Taking my usual place in the second row on the north side, I sit, make the sign of the cross and open the book. Finding the psalm appointed for the day, I look up . . . and sigh. Part of me wants to stop here. A few moments of uninterrupted silence would be fine today. But each evening must begin with prayer, and mine starts with a song and psalm. The psalm draws my sigh. I know that if I recite the psalm with an open heart, I’ll be out of control. I have no idea where it will take me. I don’t know what desires it will awaken, what anger or fear, hope or joy will bubble up, or what long-forgotten faces and experiences will appear out of nowhere. I know only that the psalm’s images and cries, whatever they are, will take me places and do things in me I can’t anticipate. Born in the fire of human experience, the Psalms evoke my experience. Not only do they insist I see what I may not want to, but that I pray it all to God, whose word has called this menagerie of images and emotions to my attention. It raises a question: Who is really praying here? Am I praying or am I being prayed? If experience is any guide, the latter is more likely. I did not call the deep desires of my heart to come to attention. They simply appeared at the psalm’s bidding and are being offered to God, who seems to want me to see it all and say it all. Things I’d forgotten, things I didn’t know about who I am and what I really want—good and bad—are simply there, revealing me to myself, the me God already knows. Paul wrote that the Spirit prays in sighs too deep for words (Romans 8:26-27). God—whose Spirit speaks the sighs—hears and understands them all. My desires, my wants, my deepest needs and fears—all of them—are prayers of the Spirit. The Spirit prays my life that I may be healed and become more like the word of God’s glory and love that God created me to be. I can resist this flow of faces, ideas and experiences, but then the process grinds to a halt. And God, who was close, loving me, fades into the background and feels unreachable. I grow dry, cold and hungry for the warmth of the love I had known. Only when I’m willing to speak to God of the joy or anger, the hopes or troubling thoughts that the psalms set loose in me, does God feel close again. The barrier--my dishonesty about what the Spirit yearns to pray in me--is removed. And the troubling “stuff” is transformed from a barrier to a bridge. The psalms won’t let me leave my life, my story, behind when I enter them. Neither will they leave me unchanged. When I enter the psalms, the psalmist’s story and mine merge. They are woven into one great story for those who hope in the God of scripture. My experiences and prayers become part of the great tapestry of God’s people, all of us praying, hoping, praising, sorrowing, dying and rising to new life. My life is one strand, adding its colors and textures to the whole. The psalms help us--evoking our desires, fears and joys so God may do with them what God wants. Reading them, the parade of images begins as the Spirit prays my life. I see the way I so often am-—confused, afraid, impulsive, untrusting of where I am going. Is this the way you remember me, Lord? Or do you remember me the way I remember my children? Thinking of them, I smile, each so different but so special, so cherished. Remember me that way, Lord.” |