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Internalizing the psalms in this way allows contemporary Benedictines to find personal relevance in this ancient poetry. Paradoxically, it also frees them from the tyranny of individual experience. To say or sing the psalms aloud within a community is to recover religion as an oral tradition, restoring to our mouths words that have been snatched from our tongues and relegated to the page, words that have been privatized and effectively silenced. It counters our tendency to see individual experience as sufficient for formulating a vision of the world.

The liturgy that Benedictines have been experimenting with for 1,500-plus years taught me the value of tradition; I came to see that the psalms are holy in part because they are so well used. If so many generations had found solace here, might I also? The holiness of the psalms came to seem like that of a stone that has been held in the palm by countless ancestors, illustrating the difference between what the poet Galway Kinnell has termed the "merely personal," or individual, and the "truly personal," which is individual experience reflected back into community and tradition. That great scholar of mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, makes the same distinction when speaking of prayer, admitting that "devotion by itself has little value . . . and may even be a form of self-indulgence," unless it is accompanied by a transformation of the personal. "The spiritual life of individuals," she writes, "has to be extended both vertically to God and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore and more truly personal it will be."

Recent scholarship regards the psalms as liturgical poems that were used in ancient Israel's communal worship. Even individual laments such as Psalm 51, it is believed, were incorporated into a public worship setting. But praying the psalms is often disconcerting for contemporary people who encounter Benedictine life: raised in a culture that idolizes individual experience, they find it difficult to recite a lament when they are in a good mood, or to sing a hymn of praise when they are in pain.

The communal recitation of the psalms works against this form of narcissism, the tendency in America to insist that everything be self-discovery. One soon finds that a strength of the monastic choir is that it always contains someone ready to lament over a lifetime of days of "emptiness and pain" (Ps. 90:10) or to shout with a joy loud enough to make "the rivers clap their hands" (Ps. 98:8). Though, as one sister says, "we're so different I sometimes think we live in different universes, the liturgy brings us back to what is in the heart. And the psalms are always instructing the heart." This is not a facile remark. The vow of "conversion of life," which is unique to Benedictines, means that you commit yourself to being changed by the words of the psalms, allowing them to work on you, and sometimes to work you over.

A cursing psalm such as 52--"You love lies more than truth . . . you love the destructive word" (v. 3)--might occasion self-recrimination, demanding that we pray it for someone who is angry with us, and also reflection on just how justified that person might be in leveling such an accusation against us. Psalm 22, which moves dramatically from pain ("My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" [v. 1]) to prophetic praise ("All the earth shall remember and return to the Lord" [v. 27]), might pose a challenge to the rational mind. What if there is no one to hear such a prayer? What if one is simply too exhausted by despair to pray it? Herein lies the gift of communal worship. "In the really hard times," says one sister, "when it's all I can do to keep breathing, it's still important for me to go to choir. I feel as if the others are keeping my faith for me, pulling me along."

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July 15 1996, Vol. 40, No. 8