Praying the ugliness

Ubiquitously throughout our liturgical prayer, the Church puts into our mouths the powerful words of the psalms.  These beautiful, ancient prayers, of course, issue from Jewish temple worship and piety.  We, receiving these treasures, get to pray at the introit of Christmas day mass the majestic text of psalm 2, “This day I have begotten you,” pondering the intimacy of the Father and the Son.  On Palm Sunday we sing the pathos-filled psalm 69 at the offertory, “My heart has awaited reproach and affliction.  And I looked for one who would grieve with me but there was none,” as we approach with Christ his Passion.  St. Benedict’s Feast day offers the beautiful chant from psalm 71, “You have given him his heart’s desire, O Lord, have not deprived him of the will of his lips.  You have set on his head a crown of precious stones.”  So many examples can be seen to wonderfully clothe our liturgical prayer—indeed, the psalms are rich and beautiful.

 However, not all of the psalms texts are so charming.  Following the Second Vatican Council, the Church omitted from the prayer book of clerics (the Roman Breviary) three psalms entirely from its use and slightly elided a handful of others.  These psalms were judged unfit for prayer on account of their harshness and the difficulties they might cause those who pray them.  Several other psalms, yet included, contain strange claims and appeals to God: “Men’s anger will serve to praise you,” (76), “They cried, but there was no one to save them; / they cried to the Lord, but in vain. / I crushed them fine as dust before the wind,” (18), “O God that you would slay the wicked! I hate them with a perfect hate and they are foes to me,” (138).  No matter what content is provided in the Church’s prayer books, the challenge of the psalms seems unavoidable.  The psalms contain quite a lot of ugliness.  How are we to approach these awful sentiments contained in the psalms when we pray?

 One proposal is to take the prompt in a straightforward, earnest manner.  When coming to a psalm that calls forth ugliness, pray the ugliness.  For example, if I am to pray “I hate them with a perfect hate, and they are foes to me,” I can easily translate that sentiment into my own circumstances: “I hate Br. _____ with a perfect hate—and he is a foe to me!”  The key word in this proposal, it must be said, is to pray these words.  Simply uttering them to the void, or complaining to myself internally won’t be sufficient.  Fomenting my own sense of aggrievement (let’s admit) is really not prayer.  I must turn my mind and heart, the core of my person, to God and say the words, “God, I truly hate X.  He is my enemy.”  And then, we can see what happens.  

Whenever I have honestly executed this strategy of speaking in so unfiltered a manner to God, I have always been corrected.  I have never found God to spur me on in my hatred.  I have never found clever new suggestions as to how Br. X has wronged me.  I have never found fuel for animus in my prayer when I have simply been honest.  Never.  The truth is, if we, with sincerity and openness, venture to expose our ugliness to the Lord, calmly avow the awful things we are really holding on to in some dark corner of our interior, we will receive something very precious and true.  It might be a harsh corrective, it might be a patient acknowledgement, it might be a consoling peace.  But it will never be an affirmation of our dishonesty.

The psalms that challenge us by their harshness, if taken earnestly, act as a dredge, kicking up the hardened sediment at our core, inviting us to let it open up.  For me, when I self-report the caustic, the bitter,  the self-righteous, the most common response that I get from the Lord is a gentle look of disbelief: “Do you really believe that?  Do you really feel that way?”  And almost all of the time my answer is prompt, “No, I don’t.”  But these irrational, self-obsessed feelings exist in my interior and I really, really need to bring them to prayer.  I need to get past the cleanliness of being a monk and hazard my way toward true reporting, true acknowledgment.  The psalms, it seems to me, invite just this kind of risky behavior.  Authenticity, of course, is not self-indulgence.  But being true does require bringing all of one’s person forward.  And, as St. John Paul II observes in Salvifici Doloris of Job in the Bible, God expects to hear from us.  The Psalms, as a foundation of our Christian prayer, invite us to pray authentically, even if it looks ugly.