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Brueggeman on Psalms

 

‘Spirituality of the Psalms’ by Walter Brueggeman (2002, Fortress Press Augsburg)

 

“In season and out of season, generation after generation, faithful women and men turn to the Psalms as a most helpful resource for conversation with God about things that matter most.” (p1) … Psalms express both side of the conversation of faith, both God speaking to us, and us addressing God.

Psalms express the “entire gamut of speech to God, from profound praise to the utterance of unspeakable anger and doubt.”

God speaks . .. “the sovereign speech of God, who meets the community in its depths of need and in its heights of celebration.” (2)

 

Brueggeman brings to the Psalms a basic three-part pattern of life and faith, which he sees reflected in the structure of Psalms

1)   “satisfied seasons of well-being that evoke gratitude for the constancy of blessing”, which he calls the “Psalms of orientation, which in a variety of ways articulate the joy, delight, goodness, coherence, and reliability of God, God’s creation, and God’s governing law.” (8)

2)   “anguished seasons of hurt, alienation, suffering, and death. These evoke rage, resentment, self-pity, and hatred. … ‘psalms of disorientation’ … ragged, painful disarray.

3)   “Human life turns in surprise when we are overwhelmed with the new gifts of God, when joy breaks through the despair … ‘psalms of new orientation’ … a fresh intrusion that makes all things new” (9)

 

Central to Brueggeman’s understanding of the Psalms is this deep process of transformation, which encompasses the full possibilities of human existence and divine action. So he is most interested in the moments in which we find ourselves moving from one experience to another, which is captured in the surprising transitions within the Psalms themselves. Psalms celebrate the fullness of life, which goes way beyond the nice polite religious experience that we tend of celebrate in our common worship.

(Even within the darkest Psalms there are still points of praise, and in the most grandiose confident Psalms there are still shadows.)

“In a society that engages in great denial and grows numb by avoidance and denial, it is important to recover and use these psalms that speak the truth about us” (13). Brueggeman challenges the church’s emphasis on the ‘nice’ psalms in a world of pain and disorientation, which he describes as “a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life … a wishful optimism” (26) “A church that goes on singing ‘happy songs’ in the face of raw reality is doing something very different from what the Bible does.” (26)

 

Using the pain-filled Psalms, he believes, “is an act of bold faith because it insists that the world must be experienced as it really is, and because it insists that all such experiences of disorder are a proper subject for discourse with God. Nothing is out of bounds, nothing precluded or inappropriate. Everything properly belongs in this conversation of the heart. … everything must be brought to speech, and addressed to God, who is the final reference for all of life.” (27) “They cause us to think unthinkable thoughts and utter unutterable words.” (29) “The remarkable thing about Israel is that it did not banish or deny the darkness from its religious experience. It embraces the darkness as the very stuff of new life.” (29) The key is that the pain is addressed to God. “What is said to Yahweh may be scandalous and without redeeming social value; but these speakers are completely committed, and whatever must be said about the human situation must be said directly to Yahweh, who is Lord of the human experience and partner with us in it. That does not mean things are toned down. Yahweh does not have protected sensitivities.” (30)

 

Brueggeman explains the various forms in Psalms, such as complaint to God, pleas for help, persuasion, and requests for revenge. What these have in common is the conviction that our suffering is also God’s problem, and that God must do something about it! What is also astonishing about the ‘complaint’ Psalms is that mostly they include sudden jumps into praise, trust and assurance. The experience of being heard sits right alongside the experience of being abandoned and ignored. The experience of trust in a mighty God is jammed up against the experience of rejection, violation and helplessness. Both are equally valid. “in stressful situations what we most yearn for is that we will be heard. That in itself is enough… and therefore the crucial thing is Yahweh’s hearing, from which everything else happily will follow.” (34) Truth frees us. Being heard changes us.

 

Jesus in the Psalms

Brueggaman’s focus is on the Jewish nature of Psalms, and he refuses to ‘go so far’ as claiming that Jesus’ own voice can be heard in the Psalms (such as Psalm 22). Brueggeman’s claim is that “the Christian use of the Psalms is illuminated and required by the cruicifixion, so that in the use of the Psalms we are moving back and forth among reference to Jesus, the voice of the psalm itself, and our own experiences of dislocation, suffering, and death.” )11) … and similarly, the psalms of ‘new orientation’ connect with the resurrection of Jesus, and bring us into conversation between “Israel’s glad affirmation and our own experience of new life surprisingly granted” 12)

 

Brueggeman asks questions of power: who’s voice is this? How might our religion, including Psalms, “serve as a form of social control” (20)? divine basis for the status quo … “Creation faith is most usually articulated by the powerful people in society.” (20), and can subtly blame those who are suffering for their own misfortune.

The ‘Disorientation’ psalms are radical because they affirm “faith in a very different God, one who is present in, participating in, and attentive to the darkness, weakness, and displacement of life.” (27) Brueggeman is particularly interested in how the communal complaint psalms can help us in our fractured world, in public events of loss. … Psalms operate not just in the realm of private emotion and spirituality, but in the big world of threat and war and destruction. “It is stunning to think that prayer of this kind might indeed be the point of entry into the larger world of faith, where the Lord of the nations governs.” (42). The common references to enemies in the Psalms is also a cry to justice on behalf of those who are ground down by systems of inequality. Psalms point ahead to a new social order, a new governance which “has moved decisively against the idols that are agents of unjust order.” 73)

 

We dare not be positivists about our spirituality, as though we live in a world in which all issues are settled. The spirituality of the Psalms assumes that the world is called to question in this conversation with God. That permits and requires that our conversation with God be vigorous, candid, and daring.

God assumes different roles in these conversations. At times God is the guarantor of the old equilibrium. At other times God is a harbinger of the new justice to be established. At times also God is in the disorientation, being sovereign in ways that do not strike us as adequate. We might wish for a God removed from such a dynamic, for a spirituality not so inclined to conflict. But the Psalms reject such a way with God as false to our daily life, and falso to the memories of this people, who know they do not belong to the Egyptian empire, but who hope for a new equilimrium in a kingdom of justice and righteousness. On this the Psalter insists passionately, vigorously, and boldly.” (74)

 

 

‘Praying the Psalms’ (1993, St Mary’s Press)

by Walter Brueggeman

 

The Rawness of Life

“the events at the edge of our humanness, the events that threaten and disrupt our convenient equilibrium, are the same ones that may fill us with passion and evoke eloquence in us. Psalms reflect such passionate and eloquent events that occur when experience presses us to address the Holy One.”

Psalms reflect experience/events “at the edge of humanness”

a)    evoke eloquence

b)   fill us with passion, and

c)    turn us to the Holy One

Psalms are “the prayer and song of common humanity” (16)

simple eloquence, overriding passion, and bold ways in which this common voice turns to the Holy One.

“the powerful, dangerous, and joyful rawness of human reality”

“The Psalms offer speech when life has gone beyond our frail efforts to control it”

 

Most of our talk tries to cover up human experience – deny or suppress the raw edges or disorientation, so “our speech is dulled & mundane. Our passion has been stilled and is without imagination. God seems far away and hardly seems important, so is not addressed . “Therefore the agenda and intention of the Psalms are considerably at odds with the normal speech of most people. … abrasive, revolutionary, dangerous … life is not like that (well-being and equilibrium). Life instead is a churching, disruptive experience of dislocation and relocation.” (17)

Issue with using Psalms in worship is that “it asks us to depart from the closely managed world of public survival, to move into the open, frightening, healing world of speech with the Holy One. … when we pray and worship we are not expected to censure or deny the deepness of our own human pilgrimage” (20)

“The work of prayer is to bring together the boldness of the Psalms and the extremity of our experience – to let them interact, play with each other, tease each other, and illuminate each other. The work of prayer consists in the imaginative use of language to give the extremities their full due and to force new awareness and new configuations of reality by the boldness of our speech. All this is to submit to the Holy One in order that we may be addressed by a Word that outdistances all our speech.” (23)

 

Disorientation

“The lament psalms of disorientation can be understood, not theoretically but in a quite concrete way, as an act of putting off the old humanity so that the new may come (cd Eph 4:22-24). Praying them requires the location of experiences in our own life and in the life of others when inclinations and realities of disorientation were singing among us … the psalms become a voice for the dying in which we are engaged, partly because the world is place of death and is passing away, partly because God gives new life but only in the pain of death.” (27)

 

Language

“In the Psalms, the use of language does not describe what is. It takes what has not yet been spoken and evokes it into being. This kind of speech resists discipline, shuns precision, delights in ambiguity, is profoundly creative, and is itself and exercise in freedom. … the language of surprise; both the speaker and God may be surprised by what is freshly offered. The language of the Psalms permits us to be boldly anticipatory about what may be, as well as discerning about what has been.

We are calling into being that which does not yet exist (cf. Rom 4:17)

 

“Metaphors are concrete words rooted in visible reality, but yet are enormously elastic, giving full play to imagination in stretching and extending far beyond the concrete referent to touch all kinds of experience. The meaning of the metaphor is determined not only by what is there but by what we bring to it out of our experience and out of our imagination.” (30)

 

“Our work in praying the Psalms is somehow to bring the stylized, disciplined speech of the Psalms together with the raw, ragged, mostly formless experience of life.. a way to do this is by exploration and exploitation of meaphors, that is, words that have concrete refence but that are open to remarkable stretching in many directions in order to touch our experience. The liberation of language means, then, that these words are free to work in many directions, but always without losing contact with their initial concreteness. … they function evocatively to shape and power our experience in new ways. (34)

… we return again and again to these words and each time we bring something different. (35)

… the poet has an amazing capacity to say much and yet leve everything open. Thus the psalm provides a marvelous receptacle that we are free to fill with our particular experience.

… the Psalms release “full freedom of imagination , an entry into the kingdom of God, possible when the words outdistance the realities.” (40)

.. Psalms are subversive literature. They break things loose. They disrupt and question. they give us new eyes to see and new tongues to speak. There fore we need not enter the presence of the Holy One mute and immobilitzed. We go there to practice our vocation of receiving the new future God is speaking of to us. To risk such prayer is to reprent of the old orientation to which we no longer belong. It is to refuse to remain in the pit – which must first be fully experienced - for the sake of the wings, which may be boldly anticipated (41)

 

Jewishness of Psalms

Brueggeman argues against a selective approach that ignores the ‘awkward’ parts of Psalms, or a ‘spiritualising’ that reinterprets Jewish themes such as Zion to refer to Jesus or the church. He refuses to allow the psalms to be “toned down”, and seeks to honour the parts that are “abrasive and offensive”. He is more interested in honouring these texts as being “poetry about our common, particular humanness.” (45)

 

He accepts a focus on how Jesus himself may have prayed the Psalms

“To pray with Jews is to be aware of the solidarity with the chosen of God whom the world rejects. “ (47(

“Torah at the centre of spirituality … hard-nosed realism about the given norms of our life, about the ethical context of our faith, about the public character of true religion. The Torah at the centre reminds us that the primal mode of faithfulness and knowledge of God is obedience.”

… a special awe before the reality of God’s judgment and mercy

The Psalms have a passion for the poor and needy, for those who are broken of spirit and heart

… such prayer is risky because we are in relation here with a God who is as precarious and at risk as we are.” 49

 

Jewishness, awkwardness … Psalms confront “the dominant ‘Greek’ reasonableness and idealism that have shaped our spirituality … contrasts with the cool, detached serenity (not to say apathy) of which we are inheritors and too often practitioners.” 47

 

the Psalms are an invitation to transform our piety and liturgy in ways that will make both piety and liturgy somewhat risky and certainly abrasive.” 54

There is a strange restlessness and shattering that belongs to Jewishness. When we learn to pray these prayers faithfully 
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Written by Silvia Purdie 

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