The Psalms Stir Memories of Faith in a Post-Religious World
The Book of Psalms is among the most cherished and remembered parts of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. Famous Psalms like Psalm 23 are hard to forget. Most people of faith have a favourite Psalm, in my case, Psalm 77!
People of many faiths, deep faith, post-faith, non-faith, or even anti-faith, still find ways to resonate with the Psalms as they sing out songs of human experience, from the deepest longings of the soul for something transcendent, all the way through to our outbursts of anger and pain where we fall into despair.
Recently, in The Australian, our national newspaper, literary critic Peter Craven writes:
If ever there were poems for troubling times they are the psalms. These poems were written in Hebrew some nine centuries before the birth of Christ and attributed to King David – but in fact they’re a collective effort on the part of the Jewish people to make sense of the exaltations and desolations of the world. They are fundamental to whatever culture we have regardless of whatever religion we might come out from under, Jewish or Christian or any other. In the streets of Karachi people will know at the back of their minds that the phrase “My cup runneth over” is from the 23rd psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures… Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death… surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.” It is a supremely tranquil poem and part of the radiance and comfort of this psalm is the way it doesn’t blink at death, instead it speaks of order, calm and peace.
It’s a great article about why the Psalms continue to capture our literary imagination. Craven concludes:
The experience of reading the psalms is at once exotic and intimately familiar. You find the reality of your own culture rising up before you, always powerful, and sometimes ghastly but with a terrific grandeur that is mightier than the form of words even though it has been displayed through the handiwork of the greatest translators the language knows and is also via the King James a huge influence on the language we use.
What is your favourite Psalm and why?
Hard to choose, but Psalm 27: I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Not only a hope of God's goodness in this present life, but a hope of resurrection.
My latest favourite is Psalm 88, because I feel like it is saying the darkness belongs to God too