Commentaries on the Psalms are yet another sub genre of spiritual reading I find all but irresistible. Some of the greatest works of scholarship and spirituality ever produced within the Christian tradition are founded on the Psalter. The history of Christian interpretation of the Psalms is a fascinating dive into the theology, spirituality, liturgy and cultural adaptability of these biblical texts as they have been appropriated by previous generations seeking the face of God.
Note I said Christian interpretation of the Psalms, not interpretation of Christian Psalms. The Psalms are the Praise Book of Israel, the core text of the Writings in the Hebrew Bible, and a thickly textured symphony of human responses of faith and questioning, of trust and desolation, of joy and lament, of peace and despair, of recovered hope and crushing loss. There are prayers and conversations, complaints and eulogies, monologues and dialogues, and the Psalmists reveal a remarkable confessional integrity of soul, hearts learning to risk transparency before the Holy One, if only because they know that they are already and inevitably deeply, intimately, knowingly, understood by the Lord. The Psalms presuppose that every experience of our lives, between gift and blessing on the one hand, and sin and suffering on the other, can nevertheless be drawn together into poems and prayers of trust, and then further drawn into the orbit of mercy and judgement, compassion and forgiveness, repentance and restoration which is the gravitational pull of the Divine Mercy.
One of my favourite commentaries on Psalms is by John Eaton a lifelong student of these Songs of Israel. His volume has the unusual merit of being a work of accessible scholarship, by a believing critic, and which incliudes after each psalm, a brief prayer written to distil thought. Psalm 66 ends with this prayer:
O God, whose work of creation embraces all that exists, grant us to know what it is to be brought near to dwell in your courts; cleanse and replenish our souls, that our prayer for the earth may be a song in tune with the trust of the distant seas and the music of the gates of morning and evening.
Not a bad prayer to begin the day, after reading a Psalm which asks for a renewed ecology of a human heart forgiven, and of an uncherished earth renewed by praise.
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