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I also discovered, in two nine-month sojourns with the Saint John's community, that as Benedictine prayer rolls on, as daily as marriage and washing dishes, it tends to sweep away the concerns of systematic theology and church doctrine. All of that is there, as a kind of scaffolding, but the psalms demand engagement, they ask you to read them with your whole self, praying, as Saint Benedict says, "in such a way that our minds are in harmony with our voices." Experiencing the psalms in this way allowed me gradually to let go of that childhood God who had set an impossible standard for both formal prayer and faith, convincing me that religion was not worth exploring because I couldn't "do it right."

I learned that when you go to church several times a day, every day, there is no way you can "do it right." You are not always going to sit up straight, let alone think holy thoughts. You're not going to wear your best clothes but whatever is not in the dirty-clothes basket. You come to the Bible's great "book of praises" through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you may feel awful, you sing anyway. To your surprise, you find that the psalms do not deny your true feelings but allow you to reflect on them, right in front of God and everyone. I soon realized, during my first residency at Saint John's, that this is not easy to do on a daily basis. Before, I had always been a guest in a monastery for a week or less, and the experience was often a high. But now I was in it for a nine-month haul, and it was a struggle for me to go to choir when I didn't feel like it, especially if I was depressed (which, of course, is when I most needed to be there). I took great solace in knowing that everyone there has been through this struggle, and that some of them were struggling now with the absurdity, the monotony, of repeating the psalms day after day.

I found that, even if it took a while--some prayer services I practically slept through, others I seemed to be observing from the planet Mars--the poetry of the psalms would break through and touch me. I became aware of three paradoxes in the psalms: that in them pain is indeed "missed-in Praise," but in a way that takes pain fully into account; that though of all the books of the Bible the Psalms speak most directly to the individual, they cannot be removed from a communal context; and that the psalms are holistic in insisting that the mundane and the holy are inextricably linked. The Benedictine method of reading psalms, with long silences between them rather than commentary or explanation, takes full advantage of these paradoxes, offering almost alarming room for interpretation and response. It allows the psalms their full poetic power, their use of imagery and hyperbole ("Awake, my soul, / awake lyre and harp, / I will awake the dawn" [Ps. 57:8]), repetition and contradiction, as tools of word-play as well as the play of human emotions. For all their discipline, the Benedictines allowed me to relax and sing again in church; they allowed me, as one older sister, a widow with ten children, described it, to "let the words of the psalms wash over me, and experience the joy of just being with words." As a poet, I like to be with words. It was a revelation to me that this could be prayer; that this could be enough.

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July 15 1996, Vol. 40, No. 8