The soul and the harp / 1 - Psalms are a means to pray even for those who do not believe and cannot find the right words
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 29/03/2020
Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
or sit in the company of mockers,
but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
and who meditates on his law day and night.
That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither
- whatever they do prospers.
Not so the wicked!
They are like chaff that the wind blows away..
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked leads to destruction. (The Book of Psalms, Psalm 1)
The psalms are a concentrate of the entire Bible. Today we begin our discussion on them, placing ourselves in the crossroad between the path of the righteous and that of the wicked.
Hence, let us begin our commentary on the Book of Psalms. However, one does not discuss the psalms. The psalms are prayed, chanted, and cried out. They are too human, too imbued with pain and love, too much of a mix of man and God. Yet we will discuss them, aware that we will probably remain on the mere periphery of their mystery. Together with the Gospels, the psalms are the best known and most translated book of the Bible. They are an essential and beloved part of the Bible, partly because they are a sort of distillate of it, with the addition of poetry, song and liturgy. The prophets, the Law, the sapiental texts, and Job are find themselves in there and in their psalms. The composition of the psalms has accompanied the entire history of Israel, constantly intersecting and intertwining with it. The first psalms date back to the time of David (at least); the latter ones reach the origins of the New Testament.
The Gospels can be told through direct and indirect quotations of the psalms they contain. Without the psalms, we would not understand monasticism, which was born, and reborn, from their prayer and chanting, functioning as the rhythm of monastic liturgy. Luther and Calvin both wrote highly memorable comments on them – thus, offering us a strange affinity between the reformed churches and monasticism. They are still the breath of daily prayer of religious communities and millions of believers around the world. Europe – with its art, its music, and its spirituality - was also created through the recitation and chanting of the psalms.
They are not treaties of theology or ethics: they are prayers. Like all authentic prayers, they were born out of the pain and love of the people, from the heart of the people and their faith. Men and women found different words, greater than any of them, within themselves as a gift, and then used them to raise their praises, to cry out their despair, to not die of pain when prayer remained the last link with life. The truest prayers are not written: they come, they are found, they appear; they emerge in our souls and then, sometimes, reach all the way to a zither and a tambourine. If it is true that prayer is part of the basic human repertoire then we can all understand the psalms, we can all sing them.
They are in essence collective, prayers of community, even when the subject of the prayer is a single person. The psalms make use of the word us, but the self is the real protagonist of the psaltery. Many psalms are prayers said and written by a single individual who communities have then turn into choral prayer, telling us that there is no need to erase individualities in search of an abstract us, in order to build a community. When the community experience is authentic, the self gives its words to the community, which in turn turns them into collective words, while still conserving their nature as personal prayers. The collective soul is not a sum or a multiplication of individualities, but the alchemy - rare and sublime - of a self that becomes us while still being me; it is the mutual dwelling of every single soul in the soul of another and of all the souls in the community. The poet composes the psalm with highly intimate words received within his soul and while saying "I" he is really saying "we"; and the community, using the psalmist's words, is really saying "we" in the words of that "I". There is no more appropriate commentary on the Trinity by Andrej Rublëv than a psalm written and sung in the first person singular.
The psalms were composed for temple worship and special occasions (coronations), but some flourished within normal life as well - within work, suffering and mourning, and in the Bible, even today, although we, confused as we are by too many different ideas of spirituality, seek them in churches or liturgists, and hence do not find them. There is nothing more secular than a psalm, because there is nothing more secular than life. Psalm 1 is also an Introduction to the entire Psalter. This is in part why the first word of the first psalm begins with alef (the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet; and the last word of the psalm begins with tau, the last letter). It is a bliss and a blessing, a wish for a good journey, a viaticum for the reader who is starting his meditation on the Book of Psalms. As if to say, whoever takes this path will be blessed, he will be like a robust tree planted along a river, and he will therefore bear fruit. The image of the tree is very much loved by the prophets (Ezekiel, Jeremiah), some fathers of the church (Gregory the Great, Rupert) saw a prophecy of the cross therein, the new "tree of life" with infinite fruit. The bliss of which the Bible speaks is not the concept of happiness of the Greeks (eu-daimonia: the good demon), nor the Glück (luck) of the Germans nor the happiness (happen: happens) of the English. Instead, it is closer to the felicitas of the Romans, where the prefix fe- is the same as in fetus, femina, ferax, stating the generative nature of a good and happy life. This bliss is a promise to bear fruit. Those fruits that evil, the wicked, on the other hand, cannot bear, because their work is scattered as the wind scatters the chaff, which flies away with the harvest - vanitas, nothingness, hevel: "the wicked vanish into thin air".
This psalm offers a decisive crossroad found in front of the man who begins his journey into the Psalter and in life, the fundamental option between the right way of the righteous and the wrongful way of the wicked. And asks him to choose, which always ends placing us among those on the right path, without resorting to using the Bible and religion to judge who the righteous or the wicked are, an all too common operation. The psalm tells us that to make a mistake when choosing at a crucial crossroad, means to lose the red thread of one’s existence and therefore not to bear fruit or to bear bad ones. The wicked are in fact the ones who chose the wrong path and therefore got lost. The greeting blessing that opens the Psalter is hence an invitation to not miss that first step. In each journey, the first and last steps are the most important ones. However, it is also a wish to not loose one’s way once inside the psaltery. In the Gospels, Satan also quotes a psalm (91) to tempt Jesus in the desert, and to tell us that there is also a diabolical and wrongful way of reading and using the psalms. Even the wicked walk, they too err following in the footsteps of Cain. The psalm promises fruitfulness to those who are righteous, but adds: "when in season". A phrase very similar to the "right time" found in Chapter 3 in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Many times, when a righteous person does not see any results, perhaps it is simply not the right season. Sometimes the season of the fruits of the rightful is simply the last one to arrive.
There is more, however. The psalm in fact adds: "all his works will succeed". A promise of reward that, in order not to be confused with a simple theology of prosperity (although present in the Bible), must be read together with what we will read in many other psalms, in the prophets and in Job, which remind us that the righteous do not always succeed. Their works often end up on ‘manure heaps’, not because they were ungodly, but precisely because they were right. Perhaps this is one of the strongest messages repeated across the entire Bible. Success is not a sign of justice, nor is failure a sign of impiety. Every day in history is full of righteous men and women who fail and wicked people who are very successful. However, we never stop hoping that there is a relationship between happiness and justice, even if we all know, including the psalmists, that life would be altogether fake, if our misfortunes and fortunes came because of our merits and faults. Hence, here we have the true nature of these psalms of bliss: I wish and pray to the just God that injustice diminishes in the world. Our same wish and our same prayer, which must never go as far as to read our and others' misfortunes as punishment, which would be the most wicked of blasphemies.
Finally, who are the wicked? And who are the righteous? We know what Jesus thought of those who felt righteous. We enter the psalms as wicked feeling just, and, if the path that we follow works, in the end we will come out as righteous but feeling ungodly. There is no more favorable time than this for meditating and praying and reciting the psalms. Many psalms were born during the most terrible moments in the history of Israel. Some were created during the exile, when none of the ancient prayers could express the unprecedented pain over a lost homeland and a destroyed temple. The psalms became a mobile temple. That long spiritual mourning generated other new prayers, among the most beautiful in the Psalter - who knows how many new psalms are being generated in our hospitals today? Perhaps the most beautiful ones will never be recorded or told by anyone, but they will not be wasted - "list my tears on your scroll" (Psalm 56, 8). Over the centuries, the psalms have given words to the prayers of those who no longer had any. They were the first prayer of those who began to pray again. Sometimes, non-believers who nonetheless needed to pray have borrowed their words, during those terrible moments when prayer becomes the only child of silence. The psalms bring us back to the slopes of Sinai, enable us listen to the words of Moses again, to cross the sea and then dance the song of liberation with Mary. A single psalm is enough to learn the true meaning of the Bible and, perhaps, of life. Have a good journey.
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