Can the Psalms Transform our Violence?

Can the Psalms transform our violence? On one obvious level, the answer is “no,” since it seems to be Psalm pray-ers and devoted Bible readers who still drop the most bombs today. The violence and vengefulness in the texts of the Psalms do not exactly mitigate the problem. Many of the Psalms are so-called “imprecatory” Psalms. They begin with heartfelt cries to God about suffering and persecution and end with the Psalmist demanding God’s graphic punishment against his enemies. “Pour out your indignation upon them and let your burning anger overtake them,” David somehow sings in Psalm 69, “May their camp be a desolation; let no one live in your tents” (Psalm 69:24–25). When vengeful people read vengeful scripture texts, we should not be surprised when violence results.

But my interest in Benedictine spirituality has convinced me that there’s more to praying the Psalms than asking God to indulge revenge fantasies. People I trust who have prayed and read the Psalms persistently find comfort in the unvarnished and messy emotion that spills through and over the verses. They say that it is an example of Scripture having the courage to mirror real life so that we can find our real lives in the sacred text.

Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of spirituality writing. It chronicles her two nine-month stays at St. John’s Abbey, the same monastery I visited with my community at the beginning of the summer. During her extended stay, she arrives at a deep appreciation of the rigorous wisdom of the Psalms, which take us on the full-spectrum journey of bringing our whole selves before God. From ugly crying to shouting curses to ecstatic exclamation, the Psalms—and the God of the Psalms—are here for us as we are: “The psalms make us uncomfortable because they don’t allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation into praise.” Norris sees an incisive psychological insight in the Psalms, too, namely that they place the shadow parts of ourselves and reality right in front of us: “The psalms reveal our most difficult conflicts, and our deep desire, in Jungian terms, to run from the shadow. In them, the shadow speaks to us directly, in words that are painful to hear.”

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Somehow the practice of praying, singing, or chanting Psalms has the capacity to reveal ourselves to ourselves. By providing such mirroring, the Psalms place our violent and vengeful selves, our lust-filled and prideful selves, our depressed and despairing selves—as well as our joyful and exuberant selves—in God’s presence, where we always are, anyway!

But what makes the Psalms transformative in this way? Perhaps the communal nature of Benedictine spirituality has something to do with it. The Benedictines sing Psalms together. Those of us seeking to follow a contemplative path may open prayer books in our living rooms each morning, but monks and nuns throughout the world open Psalters to sing in the chapel up to seven times every day. The day-in and day-out nature of praying the Psalms with others means that even though I may not be experiencing the agony of the Psalmist’s pain that particular day, someone near me is, and I’m praying with them (and tomorrow, it will be me). Here's Kathleen Norris again, on the unique alchemy that the Psalms provide, for those willing to undergo it: “What the psalms offer us is the possibility of transformation, of converting a potentially deadly force such as vengeance into something better. What becomes clear when one begins to engage the psalms in a profound way—and the Benedictines insist that praying them communally, every day, is a good place to start—is that it can come to seem as if the psalms are reading and writing us.”

Another thing to remember is that the Psalms were not written for middle-class people accustomed to denying our own suffering. They were written for and by people whose lives were being turned upside down by imperial oppression, wars, occupations, and grief. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has studied the Psalms more carefully than most, and he concludes that “The Psalms mostly do not emerge out of such situations of equilibrium. Rather, people are driven to such poignant prayer and song as are found in the Psalter precisely by experiences of dislocation and relocation. It is experiences of being overwhelmed, nearly destroyed, and surprisingly given life which empower us to pray and sing.” Perhaps one reason so many of us are uncomfortable with the Psalms is because we are uncomfortable with our own pain? Maybe the Psalms can help us take responsibility to find a better way.