Posts Tagged ‘psalms’
Poetry Friday: “Reflection upon Psalm 121”
July 12, 2019
My husband and I pray together after breakfast and after dinner, using The Liturgy of the Hours (a version of the former breviary used by Catholic priests but, after Vatican II, made available to the laity). Each Morning and Evening Prayer includes two psalms. Psalm 121 is read on one Friday evening every four weeks.…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “A Psalm to the Mansions of Heaven”
February 8, 2019
Psalm of David by Shigeru Aoki, 1906 (Public Domain) Nicholas Samaras’s poetry has always struck me as being unbelievably rich, something that is carefully sculpted and also organic, unyielding and true. It is a psalmist’s voice, and in “A Psalm to the Mansions of Heaven,” we hear a sort of ascent, a calling out to…
Read MoreMonasticism in Lockdown America: Part 9, Psalms, In the End
July 11, 2018
Thinking of the psalms as a way to cycle through the entire range of human experience, I recently brought them with me into juvenile detention. The kids there, on Sunday afternoons, shuffle through automated doors wearing orange jumpsuits and pink booties and take their seats shyly around bolted-down steel tables with me. These are boys…
Read MoreMonasticism in Lockdown America: Part 8: Psalms In the Beginning
July 5, 2018
I always privately hated the psalms. Most of them, anyway. As a teenager, I’d leaf through the Bible’s songbook quite often and feel it was full of self-pity and self-righteousness, often launching into bombastic praise of God and two lines later wishing curses on enemies. I didn’t understand why Christians still used the psalms, and…
Read MoreQuestions for the One Who Waits
September 25, 2017
I wait only for you. –Psalm 27, translated by Norman Fischer Psalm 27 is read by Jews from the beginning of the Jewish month of Elul through the Jewish High Holidays: Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year; and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It is a psalm about how fearlessness and fearfulness come…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “Psalm as Frustration I Can Live With”
August 11, 2017
Like the biblical psalms, Nicholas Samaras’s “Psalm as Frustration I Can Live With” speaks for the human condition. And, like many of the biblical psalms, Samaras’s psalm finds the human condition one of being thrust between opposite experiences. “I feel [God’s]presence only to lose it, / lose his presence only to feel it return.” And…
Read MoreA Conversation with Lauren Winner, Part 1
June 20, 2017
This post originally appeared as a web-exclusive feature accompanying Image issue 84. Each chapter of Lauren F. Winner’s book, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God (HarperOne), explores a single biblical image of God through a mix of exegesis, cultural history, and personal essay. The chapter excerpted in issue 84 is about bread. I…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “Full Thunder Moon”
November 18, 2016
The days following the election have been dark indeed. People unhappy with the outcome fear for many Americans’ safety and freedoms. Supporters of the president-elect feel alienated and misunderstood. The nation’s unsettled tenor reminds me of that post-9/11 haze in which we stumbled through our days unsure of what would happen next. Except this time…
Read MoreGetting Close to You, God: A Meditation During the Month of Elul
September 27, 2016
“You are my light and my help / Whom should I fear?” Thus begins Norman Fischer’s Zen-inspired translation of Psalm 27. Right now, at this very moment, Shabbat morning, the 14th of Elul, 5776; Sept. 17, 2016, these verses don’t resonate with me. Fear: yes, I am afraid, afraid, at the moment, that I won’t…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “I Am Poured Out Like Water”
July 15, 2016
What attracts me to this poem is something deliberately absent yet evocatively present: baptism in a river. Starting from the very first line—during monastic prayer, the speaker’s mis-chanting “Lord’s forever” as “Lord’s river”—rivers are central to each vignette. There’s the creek where, as a kid, the speaker “took a girl down to the river to…
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