The Transit Lounge

When we talk about church, we are also talking about community. This community has a special understanding of its identity and has a special understanding of its role in the world. It is the “body of Christ”, the entity which shares in and builds the life of Christ in and for the world.

One of the ways the people of the church become the body of Christ is through the prayer life of the community.

Traditionally in the church, the Book of Psalms has held a special place in shaping that prayer life; both the prayers of individuals and the prayers of the community. The Book of Psalms contains many different types of prayer: prayers of praise which celebrate the wonder of God; prayers of thanksgiving, which give thanks for God’s intervention; prayers of lament which express the pain, doubt and anger which is so much a reality of human existence.

In some communities, for example amongst Benedictine monastic communities, the whole of the Book of Psalms is prayed over a period of time. For those that use a lectionary system to guide the selection of readings for public worship, psalms form an important part of the reading cycle during regular communal worship.  The selected psalm is understood as the community’s prayerful response to the other Bible readings. When used this way, the set psalm helps to shape our prayer, our liturgical response as a worshipping community.

When we understand the psalms as prayer, and the worshipping community as the Body of Christ, the psalms take on a new dimension in helping to shape and form the Body. This can be seen to happen in two ways. First, as we pray a psalm set for a particular day, we are joining with hundreds, even millions of others who are also praying that very same prayer. We inherit a long tradition of prayers that have been prayed by worshipping communities, both Jewish and Christian, for thousands of years. So in our use of the psalms we are joined to the Body of Christ world wide and through the ages.

But there is a greater depth than this. The psalms scholar, Harry Nasuti, identifies that the psalms have a formative function when used in public worship. He suggests that when we pray a psalm, especially when its mood does not match our own, the psalms work to shape the world of the person praying according to the words of the psalms. As such, they have an effect on the person praying that would not have come into being without their use. Such an understanding of the use of the psalms is quite congenial to a recognition of their full sacramental power.[1]

When we pray a lament psalm, for example, in a time of personal joy, the psalm may not mirror our emotion, but instead helps to form us and the community we pray with. Our prayer takes on new dimensions, especially if we understand that we pray not for ourselves but on behalf of others. As we call out to God to rescue us from the time of strife, while we may not be encountering strife ourselves, we pray on behalf of all those who are. The psalm joins us to the Body and the Body takes on a sacramental role, praying for and on behalf of the world.

In effect the word of the psalm becomes a vehicle of God‘s grace — the means through which the spirit works in and through the words to form our prayerful response. In praying the psalm as part of a community, we are realising what it is to be the body of Christ — shaped by the liturgy and sharing in the spirit of God.