Psalms: The Gateway to Purposeful Prayer.

"Thy word is a lamp to my feet; a light to my path."

Jun 05, 2025

As I sit to write some thoughts on the Psalms which form the subject of our study next week on our LLM training course, the sad but not unexpected news comes of the death of Walter Brueggemann today (5/06/2025). May Walter rest in peace and rise in glory. Such a valuable gift to the Church and to the world at large. How privileged we are to have benefited from his wisdom, eloquence, love and deep humility, and how grateful for his literary legacy to allow us to enjoy his spiritual direction and scriptural sagacity.

One of the very many aspects of the Hebrew Bible (“Old Testament”), of which he was a life-long scholar and specialist, was his deep dive into the Psalms. Our attention has been drawn particularly to the chapter on Psalms as Lamentation from The Psalms & The Life of Faith (1995, Fortress Press p. 98ff.) edited by Patrick D. Miller, and titled The Costly Loss of Lament. Brueggemann notes:

Recent study of the lament psalms has indicated their enormous theological significance in the faith and liturgy of Israel and in their subsequent use in the church. There is no doubt that the lament psalms had an important function in the community of faith. (p.98)

The troubling and turbulent times in which we live it seems to me anyway, that we would do well to pay attention not only to the psalms of lament in order to express our indignation and outrage concerning current catastrophic events in such a genocide by the State of Israel in Gaza; their plundering and annexation of land in Palestine; Putin’s invasion and murderous war in Ukraine and unspeakable wickedness in Sudan and Yemen – to name but a few of the most egregious expressions of lawlessness and evildoing in our world.

It was the inspiration I got from reading Brueggemann on the psalms that led my to take a protracted look to see how they might geode and instruct me as I struggled to prayer intelligently, inspirationally as well as intuitively in a way that could evolve into meaningful, honest, prayer and worship which had seemed so lacking in my personal and corporate experience. My return to the Anglican Communion (especially the Church of England) and to a particular liturgical form of worship after over fifty years’ absence that has transformed my daily way of life and my spiritual practices.

One key element that set me on this new (for me) course was inspired by these lines from Brueggemann:

The psalms function both as acts of prayer themselves and as invitations to other prayers beyond those words…The community uses, reuses, and re-reuses these same words because the words are known to be adequate and because we have no better words to utter. The initial speakers of these words understood that prayer cannot be thought but must be spoken. At the source of this prayer tradition, the community found a particular, peculiar spokenness [sic] that we still speak: a spokenness that is daring and subversive, attuned to the reality of human hurt, to the splendour of holy power, to the seriousness of moral coherence, and to the possibility of cosmic and personal transformation…
The Psalms function not only as discipline and instruction about how to pray but also as invitation and authorization to speak imaginatively beyond the words themselves. (p.33)

I have read Tom Wright (Finding God in the Psalms), and C.S. Lewis (Reflections on the Psalms), as well as dipping into Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Psalms – The Prayer Book of the Bible), Patrick Woodhouse (Life in the Psalms), Walter Brueggemann’s other book on Psalms (Praying the Psalms – Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit), Michael Goulder (The Psalms of Asaph and the Pentateuch) and have just received Yohanna Katanacho’s Praying Through the Psalms, in which he writes his own prayers, inspired by each one of the 150 psalms in our Bible.

All amazing, absorbing, enlightening, and encouraging contributions to our study and application of the Psalms. Having written that: I still find Brueggemann’s work the deepest and richest seam of scriptural and spiritual gold.

So viscerally affected by my studies around the Psalms was I, that my whole understanding of prayer was radically transformed. From rather generic, frankly superficial and self-serving “prayers,” I was led into a greater freedom of expression, painful honesty, and the sincere “spokenness” that Brueggemann writes about. On this matter, I also found C.S Lewis especially wise and helpful regarding praying the “Cursing Psalms,” which, perhaps more than any others, require of us a Christological, Christocentric paradigm to reading and praying that is able to contextualise both the sublime and the shocking expressions of genuine human emotions and experience. As Lewis explains:

One way of dealing with these terrible or (dare we say?) contemptible Psalms is simply to leave them alone [as we mostly do in the Lectionary, and our private reading]. But unfortunately, the bad parts will not ‘come away clean’; they may, as we have noticed, be intertwined with the most exquisite things. (Op.Cit, Lewis, p25)

I found this, for example, in Psalm 139, where after much praise, wonder, and delight in YHWH’s faithfulness, creative genius, and unstinting love there suddenly breaks in expressions of indignation, outrage and hatred:

O that You would slay the wicked, O God;
Depart from me, therefore, men of bloodshed.
20 For they speak against You wickedly,
And Your enemies take Your name in vain.
21 Do I not hate those who hate You, O Lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against You?
22 I hate them with the utmost hatred;
They have become my enemies. (NASB)

But that is honesty and integrity in prayer, and so far from the religiosity of rehearsed recitations that get no further than our lips and are no reflection of our real selves and our deep hearts.

A while back I was inspired to explore my own use of the Psalms as foundations for prayer, and I have not changed direction since. I wrote a series on three Psalms that remain my daily prayer practice: Psalm 103, Psalm 51, and Psalm 139 and this is the order in which I pray through and from them. There are 3 or 4 posts for each Psalm. (The series, as it appears on this blog starts at the end, and works back to Psalm 103.)

Prayer from Psalm 102

O Lord, depression has invaded my home.

Sickness is wearing my clothes.

Pain dwells in my heart.

Do not hide your face from me (v.2)

My life is like the last pages

of and old book; its paper is fragile.

My bones are burning inside me (v.3).

Illness has sapped my courage

and ruined my appetite (v.4).

I have forgotten to eat my bread.

With every breath I hear my groaning,

and I am reduced to skin and bones (v.5).

I am like the lonely desert owl

inhabiting desolate places (vv. 6-7)

Evildoers have multiplied against me,

and my enemies despise me (v.8).

I have only ashes to eat,

and my drink is mixed with tears (v.9).

The waves of your anger

have carried me away

and cast me down (v.10)

Do not hide your face from me.

Please have mercy on me,

for I became sick

when my country suffered.

Pain entered my heart

when my people were humiliated.

Evildoers ended my joy

when they destroyed justice

and massacred love.

I beg you for mercy! Please listen to me!

Come back to your home;

be my King and the King of all people.

Come back so the sun of all compassion

may shine again

and captives return.

When you come back,

the boys and girls of my people,

who have become the children of death,

will be redeemed. (v.20)

Let heaven shower mercy on us,

for the rain of compassion heals.

Won’t you rebuild humiliated Zion

so my people can join your church?

Your absence has stabbed my heart

and has silenced the praise of my country.

The land of the cross cries out to you!

Arab nations cry before you.

Come, O Lord,

and end the season of destruction

so that we may begin to rebuild

with love.

(Praying Through the Psalms by Yohanna Katanacho; arranged in verse form by me.)

(Gaza. Getty Images 2025)

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