Psalms again

Psalm 19

[1] The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
[2] Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
[3] There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
[4] yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.

I love reading through Psalms because of the praise they offer. Last week I was talking about how they tell of the sme emotions that I have. The psalms are very human. And that is one of the reasons I go to them daily, but I also read them for the praise and joy contained.

One of the suggestions for people in turmoil is to rewrite the Psalms to express their own feelings. Whether it is from Psalm 22 where the psalm opens with "My God, my God why have you left me?" or in Psalm 142 which sets forth the idea that everyone is against the author, the psalms speak to the depth and breadth of human emotion and thought. And rewriting a psalm to express one's own feelings is a way of finding out that God can deal with all of our feelings.

(I do hope however that most of us refrain from imitating the Psalm 119's academicism of using the different words that center around the law from Hebrew for each verse and each verse uses one letter of the alphabet. I can admire the work, while I'm bored by the result.)

Does it seem strange that someone who claims to love reading scripture doing so for enjoyment, prayer, reflection, study and more would find a passage boring. Well, not entirely, but it is more of an academic exercise for me than light reading. It is like the texts of scripture where name after name is listed and deciphering why those names are important seems a sisyphean task.

All scripture is suitable for study and reflection. All scripture can lead one to God. But that doesn't mean that all people will understand every bit of scripture. We will have the places that we understand immediately, places that will make us work to understand, places that we may misunderstand, places where we need the help of others to understand. Our task is to continue to study and reflect, to pray and meditate, to work for that understanding that ultimately comes from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Doing that work with scripture is and should be a joy. Finding the nugget that helps after struggling with a passage, as though training for a race, is enjoying and serving the one who creates us. We may pass through a refining fire in getting to the understanding, but in that fire are transformed into what God calls us to be.

We are creatures of praise and study, of reflection and joy, of celebration and sorrow. The psalms help us through all of those different occasions.