Learning Wisdom from the Psalms
July 19, 2010
I’d
like to begin with a story that a friend of ours, a Director of
Novices of his religious community, would often tell. A novice
of his once said to him, and I’m sure it was more than one who
did this, “I don’t get anything out of praying the psalms.”
Since the novice had been in the community for some time the
Director knew him well. And so his response to him was: “I
think you have difficulty with the psalms because you have
difficulty receiving anything that is given to you.” The Novice
Director here was pointing to a lack, one I think we can all
recognize to some degree in ourselves, of what Fr. Adrian van
Kaam calls “transcendent openness.” The depth of our encounter
with the Psalms, and thus of their meaningfulness to us, depends
on the level of our transcendent openness, our capacity in the
moment to attune to, receive, and respond to new disclosures of
the Spirit to us.
Adrian Van Kaam points out that we are a
“fundamental possibility” for deepening spiritual presence but
that this must be activated by a personal readiness for
deepening. The new spiritual disclosures that life is always
offering to us only rise in our awareness when this possibility
and this readiness coincide. In the story above, we see the
director pointing to the fact that his novice lacks spiritual
readiness, because his mind and perhaps heart are closed to
anything that he doesn’t already possess. He lacks what
Nicholas of Cusa calls “learned ignorance,” that highest level
of human knowing that lives in awareness of how little it really
knows.
The Psalms, as all of the Sacred Scriptures, are language of
a very special kind, a language that Jesus invites us to make
our home in, because it is a dwelling place of the deepest
hospitality wherein we meet the Other and are formed, through
our transcendent openness and capacity, into that Divine life
that is our true Way of Being. But to enter that dwelling place
requires a “spiritual readiness” characterized by the learned
ignorance of which Isaiah speaks:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways and my
thoughts than your thoughts.
(Is. 55:8-9)
The Psalms, as all Sacred Words, mediate to us the mind and
heart of God, the life of Spirit, but they require of us a
“spiritual readiness” which is a not knowing. They require a
presence that seeks not only to understand but also a
willingness to receive what we do not understand.
The Psalms are constantly reminding us of who we are and of
who God is. And although we are created in God’s image,
although God has “put all things under our feet” in the words of
Psalm 8, the same Psalm also reminds us that it is God’s name
that is great. In the words of Psalm 24, “the Earth is the
Lord’s and its fullness, the seas and all who dwell in it.”
It is God who established the earth out of the chaos. In the
Biblical view it is God’s Spirit that keeps the chaos at bay,
and it is humankind’s place to witness to this truth. God is
indeed God. The glory of humankind, and the wholeness and
consonance of our lives, cosmically, communally, and personally
lie in our awareness, recognition, and praise of the Creator and
the witness and testimony such a way of living gives. In his
small book Praying the Psalms, Thomas Merton quotes St.
Augustine:
We are taught to praise God in the Psalms, not
that God may get something out of this praise, but in order that we
may be made better by it. Praising God in the words of the Psalms,
we can come to know God better. Knowing God better we love God
better, loving God better we find our happiness in God. (p. 12).
Merton points out, “The Psalms being hymns of praise, they only
reveal their full meaning to those who use them in order to
praise God. To understand the Psalms, we must experience the
sentiments they express in our own hearts. We must sing them to
God and make our own all the meaning they contain.” (p. 13).
St. John of the Cross points out that
one measure of one’s transformation in the Spirit is the passing
from seeing God in all things to seeing all things in God. This
is the way that the Psalms see all things. And so, as Merton
suggests, we begin to understand the Psalms as we also begin to
see all things, including ourselves, and all aspects of our
lives “in God.” When we enter the words of the Psalms, by
heart, when we praise God, as the Psalmist does, with our whole
being, our minds and hearts become one with the mind and heart
of God.
Psalm 90 shows us the dynamic of this
process. It begins by bringing us into that place that is our
true home, the place of our eternal life: “You have been our
abode in every generation.” The Psalm then explicates the
contrast between God’s eternity and our facticity. When we
choose to live separated from the life of God, we are “returned
to dust,” caught in a life that is, to quote Thomas Hobbes,
“nasty, brutish, and short.” The following verses contrast our
life of time with that of God. As human beings we live in
forgetfulness, we act, speak, relate, and live as if we are
eternal. Psalm 90 invites us to begin to see time as God sees
it. “For a thousand years in Your eyes are like yesterday gone,
like a watch in the night.” (v.4) To God our life is like that
of the grass that sprouts in the morning and passes or at least
changes at night. In the memorable words of verse 12: “To
count our days rightly, instruct,/that we may get a heart of
wisdom.” The Psalm invites us to see the time of our lives, of
the earth’s life, as God sees it and says that as we do so we
will develop “a heart of wisdom.” But in order to know time as
the Infinite God does we must “count our days rightly.”
We must know our finitude and our human
limits. It is by recognizing and beyond that by appropriating
and accepting our finitude that we gain wisdom of heart. And
from that wisdom we recognize that all is gift, including our
fragility and vulnerability. It is out of a sense of gratitude
that we praise God, and this gratitude is born of the
realization that Creation, including our own life, is a gift.
We are living in the proper order of things when we live in
gratitude and when our lives are filled with praise, rejoicing,
and gladness. But this is not naïve optimism, it comes from
wisdom of heart.
The Zen Master Kosho Uchiyama in his
text Opening the Hand of Thought writes:
Living in peace is the unfettered realization of
life as life and is not at all off in the clouds. Rather, all
reality, undisturbed by thought, is reflected as it interdependently
appears and disappears. Genuine peace is like a clear mirror that
simply reflects all images as they are, without anything sticking to
it. (pp. 106-7).
It is our own ideas that stick to the mirror and that cloud our
wisdom of heart. It is simple presence to things as they are
(“to count our days rightly, instruct, that we may get a heart
of wisdom”) and not as we would re-create them in our own minds
that is the source of real wisdom.
In a sermon on the parable of the weeds
and the wheat Reinhold Niebuhr writes:
Human beings are creature and creator. We would
not be creators if we could not overlook the human scene and be able
to establish goals beyond those of nature and to discriminate
between good and evil. We must do these things. But we must also
remember that no matter how high our creativity may rise, we
ourselves are involved in the flow of time, and we become evil
at the precise point where we pretend not to be, when we pretend
that our wisdom is not finite but infinite, and our virtue is not
ambiguous but unambiguous. (italics added, p. 48, The
Essential Niebuhr) .
When we cease “to count our days
rightly,” that is forget the difference between who we are and
who God is, then we, as readily as anyone, can become evil. The
Psalms remind us not to despise our human state, our actual
life, but rather to receive it as God gives it to us and thus
wisely to respond to the gift with gratitude and joy.
