BOOK REVIEW : Praying the Psalms by Thomas Merton

Abbey of Gethsemani – August 1962 by Pimon Singhasin

Since starting at St Giles-in-the-Fields I think have said more psalms each day than ever before! The Book of Common Prayer is the basis for all the liturgy here. In it, all 150 psalms are said consecutively, with the Psalter dividing the text into sixty groups of Psalms to be said each day of the month at Morning and Evening Prayer.  When a month has thirty one days, the psalms set for the thirtieth day are repeated. 

‘Praying the Psalms’ is a short essay by the Catholic Priest and Trappist Monk Thomas Merton. In it he offers advice on how to gain a “lived sense” of the Psalms - something he says is vital if we are to truly pray with them. 

For Merton, the importance of experience seems to take precedence over academic understanding; the purpose of praying the psalms, he states, is to help us to surrender ourselves totally to God. This perfect peace is the “fundamental religious experience” which all the Psalms can teach us. Theologians from other traditions might disagree with the method but not the aim. 

Where Protestant writers, such as Bonhoeffer, would concur with Merton is that we can find Christ in the Psalms. Merton states: “Together with the Our Father, which Jesus himself gave us, the Psalms are in the most perfect sense the Prayer of Christ.” 

But for Merton the way to this revelation is through our emotions and experiences. “The Psalms are songs of men who knew who God was” he writes. To understand the psalms we must, like those who wrote them, experience the sentiments they express in our own hearts.  

Whereas for Bonhoeffer, the purpose of praying the psalms is to understand Christ’s life and passion rather than our own, for Merton in engaging with the psalms, we are to recognise in them connections to our own lived experience - and through prayer and by His grace, our lives become oriented to God in faith. 

Merton suggests that slow and prayerful contemplation on the words of a psalm or a particular verse are more helpful in this regard than reading them verbatim; equating the Psalms with poetry. “Christ prays in us when we meditate on the psalms perhaps even more so than when we recite them vocally”.

In doing so, he states that we will find certain psalms “fit our own condition and experience better than others” describing this as a prompt by the Holy Spirit to encourage us to dwell on these particularly - to “move in” to them.  

While Merton does not explicitly say that other Psalms are less important, he makes it clear that a preferential (Spirit-led) approach is acceptable. Much of the latter part of the essay includes quotations from particular psalms and how the themes they express are most suitable for contemplation at particular times of joy or sorrow.

Here, Merton’s method seems to most noticeably differ from that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who in Life Together urges us not to overlook psalms we find difficult to relate to because it is often by engaging with these prayers - the psalms that seem so “other” to us - that we encounter the prayers of the suffering Christ. 

While Merton comments that certain psalms offer an appropriate basis for contemplation in times of corporate suffering or mourning (such as Psalm 2), and provides guidance for the use of psalms in family prayers, the overriding sense throughout his essay is one of individual experience. Bonhoeffer emphasises throughout that the psalms - and the prayers that we derive from them - do not belong to us individually but the whole Body of Christ, who is our intercessor.

Early in his essay, Merton states that God can be praised both in sorrow and joy - but describes the most joyful (such as Psalm 116) as the “psalms par excellence” - because it is through these that our thoughts become most closely aligned to the life of praise which will characterise our eternal life with God. 

He concludes by explaining that it is not a question of “what we get out of the psalms but what we put in to them.”

Indeed those seeking to “get something out of them” will inevitably find themselves disappointed. 

Having said all the Psalms in the first month of my curacy I can identify with Merton’s suggestion that certain psalms seem to relate to my particular experience or situation on a particular day - and that this connection is a helpful basis for contemplative prayer. But sometimes - as Bonhoeffer suggests - there have also been times when the opposite is true; the psalms seem perplexing and alien to my experience. I hope to learn to dwell more on these just as much - to help me come closer to the joys and sufferings of others. 

We are fortunate to have the wisdom of both approaches in order to help us enter fully into the meaning of the psalms. 

Image: Abbey of Gethsemani - August 1962 by Pimon Singhasin