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Email a FriendPosted by daria on Wednesday, Jun 29, 2011 11:01 AM (EDT):
Rebecca, I only found an abbreviated version of this on the vatican site. Where did you find yours?
Learn To Pray With the Psalms
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Tuesday, June 28, 2011 11:00 AM
Last week’s papal audience was dedicated to praying with the Psalms.
First, a reminder:
We’re trying to collect 60 rosaries for Benedict XVI’s 60th anniversary of ordination tomorrow. Post your pledge here between now & July 1st.
On to the Psalms!
The pope starts with a brief explanation of what they are:
In the Psalms, joy and suffering, desire for God and the perception of one’s own unworthiness, delight and the sense of abandonment, trust in God and painful solitude, fullness of life and fear of death are all interwoven and expressed. The believer’s whole reality flows into these prayers, which first the people of Israel and then the Church took up as a privileged meditation on the relationship with the one God, and the fitting response to His self-revelation in history.
As prayer, the Psalms are manifestations of the soul and of faith, in which everyone can recognize himself and in which there is communicated that experience of special closeness to God, to which each man is called.
He points out that even the lamentations are expressions of faith. When we remonstrate with God, it is because in fact we expect to be answered!
two great areas can be identified that synthesize the prayer of the Psalter: petition, which is connected with lament, and praise—two interconnected and almost inseparable dimensions. For petition is animated by the certainty that God will respond, and this opens up to praise and thanksgiving; and praise and thanksgiving flow from the experience of salvation received, which assumes the need for the help expressed by the petition.
Praying the Psalms teaches us how to pray, he says, in much the same way a child learns to speak.
Something analogous happens when a child begins to talk; when he learns, that is, to express his feelings, emotions, and needs with words that do not belong to him naturally, but which he learns from his parents and from those who live around him. What the child wants to express is his own personal experience, but the means of expression belong to others; and little by little he appropriates them—the words received from his parents become his words, and through those words he also learns a way of thinking and feeling; he enters into a whole world of concepts, and in this [world] he grows, relates with reality, with men and with God. At last, the language of his parents becomes his language; he speaks with the words received from others, which by now have become his words.
He makes some further observations about the figure of David, and how he could be a man “after God’s own heart” in spite of sinning seriously many times, and later about the significance of the Psalms in Jesus’ own prayer, and how the Psalms prophetically speak of him—which means when we pray them, we are praying Christ’s own prayers.
The Christian, therefore, in praying the Psalms, prays to the Father in Christ and with Christ, taking up those songs within a new perspective, which finds its ultimate interpretative key in the Paschal mystery. Thus do the horizons of the one who prays open up to unexpected realities—each Psalm acquires a new light in Christ and the Psalter is able to shine in all its infinite richness.
Dearest brothers and sisters, let us take this holy book in hand…
Previous posts in this series (find links in them to all the pope’s audiences on prayer)
Adoration Renews Our Hearts (Session 6)
Intercession is the Mercy of God (Session 5)
Prayer Expresses the Self (catecheses 2-4)
Pope Floats (introductory session)
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Posted by Rebecca Teti on Wednesday, Jun 29, 2011 1:25 PM (EDT):
Whoops! I intended to put in the Zenit link, thanks for pointing out I hadn’t. It’s there now! The Vatican site only gives summaries, not translations, for the Wednesday audiences (though you can find the original Italian in full). Usually Zenit is quickest to translate, though sometimes Vatican Radio beats ‘em to it.
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