The Good News of the Cursing Psalms
and Other Oxymorons
Teresa Jackson O.S.B.
Monastery of St. Gertrude
465 Keuterville Rd.
Cottonwood, ID 83522
We live in a world where the darkness often seems overwhelming. Ours has been a century marked by genocide, the threat of nuclear destruction and a growing chasm between the haves and have-nots. In our personal lives we increasingly understand the power of our "shadow," the internal darkness that can erupt in anger, depression, violence or substance abuse. The threat and reality of facing evil, injustice and sin can become enervating. Whether it is global issues of justice or issues of personal demons it is easy to become drained, stripped of any energy or power to work for change and transformation.
In the face of what seems like insurmountable problems beyond any solution, the Benedictine practice of the Divine Office may offer a surprising source of hope. In praying the Psalms on a daily basis we have the opportunity to create a new reality in the face of the power of sin, evil and brokenness. In our prayer we bring about a world in which YHWH is judge and will bring about justice. As praying communities we create a reality in which prayer does not have to be nice; in which there is no experience or emotion that cannot be brought before God and redeemed.
What are we doing when we pray the Psalms in the Divine Office everyday? Too often Office can be an unconscious, rote practice for us. The Psalms are familiar, but they don't always penetrate our consciousness. We don't often wonder why we pray the Psalms or what it means to the world that we do.
The Psalms are not always nice or polite. They are filled with anger and anguish as well as beautiful hymns of praise and comfort. The Psalms can be rather embarrassing, filled with calls for God to kill enemies, desires for retribution and cries of the depth of anguish. So what happens when we pray these Psalms as a community?
In Israel's Praise Walter Brueggemann pursues the idea that the Psalms were the prayer of the cult in Israel, the prayer of the gathered community. In praying the Psalms Israel would engage in a process of "world making." Through their prayer they were engaged in "constituting" the world of the Psalms, not simply reacting to the world around them. For Brueggemann the act of praise in the Psalms acts as a way of helping to bring about a world where YHWH reigns and praise can either reinforce the current reality or bring about a new one.
Using this vastly over-simplified version of Brueggeman's thesis we can ask what "world" we are making when we pray the Psalms daily as a community, especially when we pray the "cursing" Psalms of imprecations and retribution against enemies. It is easy to be somewhat embarrassed by these Psalms in the Office, to want to politely sweep them under the rug and hope no one will notice that we are praying about killing our enemies However, in doing so we run the risk of losing the transformative power that these Psalms may have in our lives if we are willing to take the risk of wrestling with them to obtain their blessing.
The "cursing Psalms" are difficult to deal with because they make us face the fact that not all "good news" is pleasant or comforting. These Psalms name the reality of evil and injustice without blinking, and claim the depths of the pain that such evil causes. For most of us who have lived lives of relative comfort, who have never had to live with systematic oppression, it is difficult to relate to the anger that these Psalms invoke. How can people wanting to dash babies against the rocks (Ps. 137) be anything but barbarous?
These Psalms require us to look at two things, the experience of the most broken and wounded in our world today, and our culpability as individuals and nations. The Psalms can open us to an awful, threatening reality in which our experience is turned inside out. The reality of the cursing Psalms is a world in which the afflicted are comforted and the comfortable are afflicted.
The cursing Psalms usually name two different realities or worlds, the reality in which people currently live or have experienced and a new world in which YHWH reigns and will bring justice. In these Psalms the depths of anger and pain and sorrow are not denied but faced and articulated. The Psalms articulate a world in which enemies are real, and the pain they cause cannot be denied or explained away.
The Psalms contain another aspect that we tend not to grasp, that they are addressed to YHWH. The Psalmist is not simply stating a general principle that the wicked should be destroyed but is imploring YHWH to create a new world in which the Lord's justice will prevail. The Psalmist is creating a new reality in which oppression is not simply a fact of life, but one in which there are consequences to actions. No one can simply continue to heap shame and violence on the weak. God reigns and a day of justice will come.
This still sounds too violent for our modern tastes. It still smacks of a God of vengeance, of divinely sanctioned violence. We feel that these sentiments cannot be reconciled with the theology of forgiveness inherent in Christianity. But to truly understand the Psalms that we pray everyday we need to take a deeper look at our attitudes, and see where we are confronted and challenged by these Psalms. If we simply ignore them, rationalize them or leave them out of our song books we will be missing a difficult but important lesson.
Most of us who are native North Americans, born after the middle of the century, have no real experience of oppression. Violence, hunger, destruction and injustice are abstract concepts or the stuff of the television news, not our lives. Usually when we confront these problems at all it is as distant spectators or as problem solvers, not as victims. We deplore what is happening in the rest of the world or we try to fix the problems. We work for systemic change in our political systems and way of giving aid. We see ourselves as part of the solution on behalf of other people and the experience of violence remains second hand. The pleas for the destruction of enemies, the use of violence against oppression seems distasteful because we live in a world in which there is a solution to every problem, or at the very least new problems quickly replace old ones in our consciousness and we don't have to live with the on-going reality of violence.
But what of the victims of violence and genocide in our world today? What do the cursing Psalms say to victims of the Holocaust, of Pol Pot in Cambodia, of the atrocities of Rwanda? When the oppression and the violence and the destruction are real, what do these Psalms say?
Obviously none of us who live lives of comfort can speak for these victims, but perhaps we can begin to see how the Psalms that we find so repulsive can be good news. The Psalms of vengeance can begin to articulate a world in which the oppression and genocide are not the final word, where the victims will at last be vindicated. This is not a world of human retribution, unthinkingly giving back to the aggressors their same measure of violence. The Psalms call into being a world where God will act, where YHWH is the final arbiter of fairness. For the victims, the Psalms are creating a world different from their current reality in which there is no hope that their lot will change or that they will be anything other than victims. The Psalms call into being a new world in which destruction and tyranny will no longer rule, but the Lord's justice will reign.
Most of us live in a world in which anger is not a completely acceptable emotion. We are nice people who believe in a religion of peace and we may not experience anything that really seems to make us angry. When our reality is then confronted with the reality of the cursing Psalms we experience a sense of dislocation. We feel that these are not acceptable sentiments for prayer.
Once again, though, the cries for destruction of enemies and vengeance can become good news. To people who have lost everything, their families, their health, their possessions, their autonomy, anger is not a foreign emotion. For the victims of atrocities in our world anger is a healthy response. When people are able to feel anger rather than simply the emptiness of loss, healing can begin. The Psalms then facilitate this healing because they engender a reality in which it is God who is called upon to act. We are not called upon to personally destroy our enemies but we reaffirm our faith that God is Lord and will bring about justice. A cycle of violence is not being created but rather an affirmation that evil will not triumph.
For those of us who are lucky enough to have faced a personal reality of violence or oppression, these Psalms can also enrich our prayer. There is no emotion, sentiment or experience that cannot be brought to prayer. Our experience of oppression may be trivial, but it is nonetheless real to us. Rather than simply denying the reality of our anger or hurt or despair we can find them echoed in the Psalms. By praying rather than denying the depths of our feeling we begin to create a world in which our feelings are transformed. Our anger and pain is brought before God and we are not alone. We may not be able to act or change our situation but we can claim the reality that God has not deserted us and will act in God's own time, if not our own.
By objectifying our deepest, most painful reality we begin to change it. The pain and anger and despair are no longer simply personal. We share our experience with God, with the Psalmist, with thousands of years of people who have prayed these same Psalms. Our world is no longer quite so limited, we are no longer totally alone, we realize that there is nothing that we have experienced that cannot be shared with God and with others.
So what is the good news of praying the Divine Office in our day. In our prayer together, in praying all of the Psalms, we have an opportunity to pray in solidarity with those victims who have no voice, who cannot pray. We lift up the victims of this centuries violence and begin to create a world in which their suffering and death is not without meaning but one in which God will act and bring about justice for them. In the Psalms we can claim the depths of our own darkness and that of others knowing that in our prayer we are bringing about a world of justice, a world where evil will not have the last word.