Today’s practice will be about writing our own Psalms, poems addressed to God that express our thoughts, fears, hopes and trust with wild abandon, often using dramatic language. It’s a bit like journaling in its introspection and tendency towards ‘shitty first drafts’, but goes beyond that. As I wrote in my post on Psalms as a biblical genre:
The Psalms offer a refreshing — sometimes shocking — alternative to [the lack of interior life we see in the rest of the Old Testament]. Here, emotions are expressed in lively, visceral ways, without any attempt at shying away from them or putting on a ‘holy’ face (what people today call ‘spiritual bypassing’). Psalm 137 comes immediately to mind with its heartbreaking lament, “How can we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?”, and its horrific (but very human) concluding wish: “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”
More common than Psalm 137’s disturbing endnote, however, are Psalms in which we see emotional growth or processing happening within them, for example, moving from a place of anxiety to one of trust in God’s faithfulness. As such, in the past I’ve compared some Psalms to what Brene Brown has called “shitty first drafts,” where we tell a story in a certain way to get the emotion out, allowing us to move through our feelings and into a more well-rounded perspective on what’s happening. Perhaps the best example of this is Psalm 22, which begins with an expression of desolation and abandonment (”My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, with fifteen more verses describing this state of foresakenness), moves through an expression of prayer and hope that God will act (”But you, O Lord, do not be far away! O my help, come quickly to my aid!”), before finishing with an expression of complete trust in God (”Future generations will be told about the LORD, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it”).
What happens when we take this approach on for ourselves as a sacred practice? Honestly, in my experience it’s pretty fun. Slipping into the Psalms’ poetic devices, like parallelism, amplification, analogy, and hyperbole turns my own stories into something grand, simultaneously honouring and giving voice to my feelings while also sort of taking the piss out of them. And the movement so characteristic in the Psalms from anxiety or complaint into trust and thanksgiving is helpful too. The practice is therefore a wonderful way to, as Pema Chodron put it, “feel the feeling and drop the story,” to process and move through the feelings to get to a better, truer, and more faithful story.
As an example, here’s one I did a few weeks ago, in which I expressed my anxieties for the future:
A Personal Psalm
I’m in the dark, O LORD:
Enlighten my path.
In a world of stormy seas, help me to find safe harbour
In a world of brigands and wolves, help me to find shelter.
In a world of locked doors, help me to find my place of opportunity.
In a world of ‘no’, help me to find my ‘yes’.
I know you are with me.
I am not as alone as I feel.
Help me keep to the path you have set for me
but also to serve others as best as I can for your sake.
And bring me safely into your eternal light.
Amen.
Nothing is new or exciting here. These are pretty universal concerns. But writing them in this form helped give voice to them and move me through my emotions of anxiety and frustration into an outward-looking and hopeful perspective. After writing it, I felt a lot lighter.
In terms of soul speech, I think the meat of the practice is in listening to the big feelings and seeing where they take us. Sometimes a symbol that will come up when I’m doing a practice like this will stick out and stay with me (the ‘locked doors’ in the example above stayed with me to the extent that I undertook an active imagination on them). Other times, it’s that moment where the narrative shifts from fear to trust that feels the most authentic expression of the heart. (If it doesn’t, that’s a sign for me that I may be spiritual bypassing and need to spend more time in my feelings.)
In these ways, writing our own psalms can be a helpful tool in our spiritual toolkit. The fact that it’s a tool that can be fun to use is just a bonus.
Matthew Root 