How to Pray the Cursing Psalms during Holy Week

Dame Maria Boulding OSB wrote out of deep scholarship, alert self-awareness, and perceptive compassion about human hopes and failings, and all this informed by a lifetime of obedience within a Benedictine community. I treasure her books. During Lent I've made my way slowly through her last book, written as she endured painful terminal illness, within the loving support of her community.

Gateway to Resurrection is a gentle reaffirmation of fundamental Christian beliefs centred on God's coming in Jesus, and the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As a world class scholar and translator of Augustine, and as one who has reflected and practised the Rule of Benedict for a lifetime, she offers us a rich weaving together of her own experience, Benedictine spirituality, the biblical riches of Augustine's Expositions of the Psalms and the psychological narrative of his Confessions. But this is spiritual writing that is humble yet assured, accessible but utterly unpatronising, full of faith without for a moment encouraging uncritical piety or unthinking assertion in the face of disturbing questions - doubt too, has its place in our journey to God.

She is spiritually shrewd on the vexed question of what we do with some of the cursing Psalms - for example, how does a Christian pray, 'O God break the teeth in their mouths'. (Mind you I guess some of us, some of the time, know perfectly well how to pray a line like that!).  But to pray for the extermination of our enemies children, and to wish those we hate dead and their children orphans - hard to reconcile prayers like that with the Sermon on the Mount. Her answer is profoundly theological, based on taking the humanity and divinity of Jesus with equal and utmost seriousness:

When the Word of God, the Son of God, became man, he was not man in some abstract sense, but a man of a particular race, culture and time. What the instinctive Jewish response to injustice, cruelty or hatred were like, we hear in many of the cursing Psalms. Jesus was personally sinless, and his response sprang from love, but because he came in the loikeness of sinful flesh and to deal with sin (Rom 8.3), he took up all our passionate responses into the raw material of his prayer, as he also took the flesh of Israel as the raw material of his sacrifice. We may find it possible as we pray these psalms simply to be with Christ in his Passion, as he assumes all these shouts of rage and despair, all these raw demands for vengeance, and transforms them: 'Father forgive them, for they know not what they do'.

At least we can be sure of two things about these psalms: first, that the sweet singers of Israel were rithlessly honest before God, and never thought that anything that was important to them was unsuitable to mention in his presence; second, that there are pre-Christian and non-Christian elements in ourselves that may benefot from exposure to God in prayer.

Over the years I've read so many commentaries and theologies that wrestle with the imprecatory psalms. Here at last is a suggestion that is profoundly Christian because deeply rooted in a full and practised Christology. That our worst thoughts can become our most honest prayers, and be redeemed by being caught up into the Passion of God in Christ, and our darkest places flooded with resurrection light, and that these our most destructive responses are drawn into the eternal life-giving love of the Triune God - that's a thought worth pondering, and a way worth trying to walk, starting this Holy Week.

Comments

[Bob MacDonald]

She has made a true statement. Violence given to the infinite cannot then be taken up by the one who gave it. But - just how many of these psalms are there and what do we call them? By my count, there is only one psalm that is under the rubric of 'invective' - that is Psalm 109. Violence enters many psalms both from the inner perspective of the poet and from the recognition of violence in others. But not all violence prayed is invective. You use the term 'imprecatory' and I try to guess its meaning as a prayer against others. But frequently the poet prays for the shame of others, which can be seen as a desire that their conscience be quickened.

The BCP of 1958 in Canada did not even include Psalm 58 in it. There was no such Psalm, we were told. But it is one of the 6 Miktamim (15,56-60) and one of the four inscribed Do Not Destroy (57-59,75). I have wondered whether it is these psalms that we must pray or we will find ourselves fulfilling the violence and abuse on others. Psalm 75 is the one where the wine in the cup is drunk. Surely this is in anticipation of the events we recall week.

[Jim Gordon]

Apologies to Chris and Bob for the delay in posting their comments. Been on holiday and been busy - not an oxymoron just the way life is.

Bob, as always your comment makes me think again - but if we believe the Psalmists spoke with utter frankness to God, then vengeance and grief, anger and despair would be part of the genuine experience of people of faith facing life's extremities. The collisions of emotional and theological responses within the collection of Psalms is what makes them the prayer book of the human heart, and also enables such prayers to be an honest and authentic cry of faith whether struggling or celebrating, questioning or affirming.

But yes, any reading of the Sermon on the Mount, and serious reflection on the pivotal event of God in Christ reconciling the world to himself, making peace by the blood of the cross, requires of us the responses of those who are ministers of reconciliation. The eucharistic cup, of anguished suffering and suffering love, of shared faith and holy communion, itself holds together the polar extremes of human experience and the infinite range of Divine love and peacemaking.