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Adults can be hypersensitive about admitting to offensive emotions, and children sometimes are more able to allow for the hyperbole of the psalms. I once assigned Psalm 109 in a class I was teaching, and one woman ended up reading it to her nine-year-old granddaughter after she had encountered her in tears. It was a hot afternoon, and the girl had ridden her bike over a mile along a dusty trail to the neighborhood swimming pool, hoping to cool off. But she arrived just as the staff was closing it, and one officious youth was short with her. Her grandmother explained that she had to study a poem about being angry, and it might help to read it aloud. But soon after, she had entered the catalogue of curses--"Let their children be wanderers and beggars / driven from the ruins of their home. / Let creditors seize all their goods" (vv. 10-11)--the child cried out, "Oh, stop! Stop! He's just a college kid!"

The daily praying of the psalms helps monastic people to live with them in a balanced and realistic way, appreciating their hyperbole without taking it as prescriptive. Benedictines become so close to the psalms that they become, as more than one sister told me, "like a heartbeat." The psalms do become a part of a Benedictine's physical as well as spiritual life, acting on the heart to slow it down, something I came to know as I often came to noon prayer with my mind still racing with the work I'd interrupted. Beginning to recite a psalm such as 62, which begins, "In God alone is my soul at rest," I would feel as if I were skidding to a halt. Like many of the psalms, it laments human falsity, those who "with their mouth . . . utter blessing / but in their heart they curse" (v. 4). But the next line: "In God alone be at rest, my soul," offers not only a pleasurable poetic repetition but a shift from pain into hope, a widening of horizons that is not only sound but comforting.

Daily exposure to the psalms also makes it possible to become numb to them, to read even the most stunning poetry ("By God's word the heavens were made, / by the breath of God's mouth all the stars" [Ps. 33:6]) in such a way that you scarcely notice what you've said. But what often happens is that holiness reasserts itself so that even familiar psalms suddenly infuse the events of one's life with new meaning. One sister told me that as she prayed the psalms aloud at the bedside of her dying mother, who was in a coma, she discovered "how perfectly the psalms reflected my own inner chaos: my fear of losing her, or of not losing her and seeing her suffer more, of saying goodbye, of being motherless." She found that the closing lines of Psalm 16--"You will show me the path of life, / the fullness of joy in your presence"--consoled her "as I saw my mother slipping away. I was able to turn her life over to God."

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July 15 1996, Vol. 40, No. 8