+LETTING CHRIST SING IN AND THROUGH OUR VOICES Chap. May 26, ‘24
This morning I thought to share some reflections on how to make the psalms we recite or sing each day, a deeper part of our prayer life. It is one thing to recite them as we do at Vigils or to sing them as we do at the other Hours but another to allow them to become prayer that arises up out of the depth of our hearts.
There is a book by a Frank J. Matera called Praying the Psalms in the Voice of Christ that was recently published and acquired by our library. In the preface, the author describes what he hopes to convey:
“The goal of this project is simple: to provide those who read the psalms, especially in the Liturgy of the Hours, with a way to pray them in the voice of Christ and his Body the church. The operative word here is pray. This is not a historical-critical commentary, nor is it a critique of that method, which I find most helpful. Rather, it is an attempt to show believers how to hear the voice of Christ in the psalms so that they can pray them in his voice and the voice of his Body, the church.”
Matera, as a priest, found himself changing how he prayed the psalms over a period of fifty years. Like some of us, he first sang them in Gregorian Chant as a seminarian and found this to be a “transcending experience,” even though he did not fully understand what he was singing. As he “became more familiar with the theological and liturgical structure of the Liturgy of the Hours, the psalms began to take on a deeper meaning.” Only later in life did he encounter St Augustine’s great work of Expositions of the Psalms that made a huge difference in how he prayed them. Matera realized that as he waded into the waters of Augustine’s experience, there was a lot he had been missing. For Augustine and his contemporaries, to quote Matera:
“The psalms are the words of Christ and his Body, the church. They speak in the voice of the whole Christ (totus Christus), that is, in the voice of Christ who is ‘the head of the body, the church’ [as St Paul tell us in Colossians 1:18; and in Ephesians 4:15]. Whether they speak in the voice of Christ the head or in the voice of his Body, the psalms always speak of and about Christ for Augustine. The voice of the head and the voice of the Body are not two different voices. They form one voice, the voice of Christ, which is heard from the perspective of the head or from the perspective of the body… This means that the voice of Christ can become our voice since Christ invites his people to make his prayer their own.”
When we are standing there in choir seven times a day, we are never there alone but Christ is right there in our midst, praying in us and through us. I know in my own praying the psalms this has become more and more meaningful each day as I realize that my prayer is that of the whole Christ, of Head and Body. I am entering into the prayer of the Christ wherever He may be in our world today, into the prayer of the people of Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Haiti,Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Libya, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo etc.
After all, God has taken on their humanity as well as my own. To convey this, Fr. Matera goes on to quote from St Augustine himself:
“God could have granted no greater gift to human beings than to cause his Word, through whom he created all things, to be their head, and to fit them to him as his members. He was thus to be both Son of God and Son of Man, one God with the Father, one human being with us. The consequence is that when we speak to God in prayer we do not separate the Son from God, and when the Body of the Son prays it does not separate its head from itself. The one sole Savior of the Body is our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God who prays in us, and is prayed to by us.”
This is to see and pray the Psalms in a much larger context than that in which they were originally written, to pray them from the vantage point of our faith in Christ’s saving death and life-giving resurrection. As we let ourselves sink into this Christ consciousness, they have a lot more meaning for our life of prayer. And I wonder if it isn’t this what St Benedict had in mind when he tells us that nothing is to be preferred to the Work of God.
After all, what can be more meaningful for us than to make Christ’s prayer our very own, to let his presence pervade our lives more and more as we attend the Divine Office. Through it we are made sharers in his own divine life.