The gift of the psalms

Not a few of my fellow Aspirants were left in wonderment after this past weekend's session of our deaconate formation classes. Sister Mary Timothea Elliott, RSM came not just to give us instruction on the Liturgy of the Hours, but to teach us about the psalms themselves. Firstly, I was left mesmerized, then I found myself thumbing through psalms and corresponding scriptures during Sister's talks. I was getting so much out of them that I couldn't wait from one break to the next to hear more. When it was finally over, there were several of us who said that we wished we could have at least another day of this, and we didn't want it to end.

                             Sister Mary Timothea Elliott, RSM                                                     

We've already had a great Old Testament Scripture scholar in Father Ragan Shriver give our Introduction to Scripture course. Father Bede Aboh, who gave our Philosophy lectures last month, told me that "you will love Sister Timothea, you won't want it to end." Father Bede was right...

It didn't take us long to figure out that Sister is not only well-educated (she is so well-versed in Hebrew and in the Biblical languages that Father Ragan-himself very learned in Hebrew-recommends her as a source of good material and information), but she is an educator and has been a very good one for years. She captivated a room full of grown men, and taught us so much about the psalms that none of us wanted it to end-we wanted more.

As I pointed out in my entry Thursday, I have always loved the Liturgy of the Hours ever since I was first introduced to it as a college student. Entering formation for the deaconate has truly deepened this love, and I resolved to pray the Office more faithfully, and less out of a mere sense of rote duty-in other words, I resolved to truly pray without ceasing in a way that I have never prayed before. Most importantly, I resolved to make my prayers, as best as I could understand to do so, conform to God's will and to the prayers of the whole Church rather than to my own personal desires.

It might very well be that Sister Timothea didn't realize what a gift she gave me when we read some of the psalms in the Scriptures. Of course, we pray the psalms as part of the Divine Office every day, but in some cases, certain psalmody are excluded from the Liturgy-all or part of the so-called Imprecatory Psalms, or Cursing Psalms. These portions of the psalter can be problematic when introducing the Office to laity who aren't well-catechized, and so for this reason the Church made the decision to remove them from the Liturgy. As Sister Timothea pointed out, however, just because these psalms aren't in the current edition of the Liturgy of the Hours does not mean that there may not be some appropriate reason to pray them privately. However, one can understand why we would not want to have public recitation of words like:

How blessed will be the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. (Psalm 137:9)

Let death take my enemies by surprise; let them go down alive to the grave.
(Psalm 55:15)

Obviously, Christ is clear that we should not do such things to our enemies. However, those few people who knowingly embrace the lowest form of evil and reject all good with complete knowledge (Sister used the example of Nazis engaged in biological experiments and mass murder of Jews, Gypsies, and disabled people), praying psalms like this might be a way of petitioning God to put an end to such atrocities and those who commit them-indeed, one person who prayed this way would themselves become a great mystic.The idea of praying the psalms uniquely and individually seems as though it would be a source of deep spiritual richness and enhancement of prayer life.

Sister also took us through a lesson in how to use the Ordo of the Liturgy of the Hours and helped us learn to place our ribbons and use our liturgy books in a way that is proper.

I had the pleasure of sitting for breakfast with Sister Timothea yesterday morning. During the course of her lectures, she managed to confirm my personal bias toward the Revised Standard Version, and she told us collectively that she preferred to use it when teaching. However, when I asked her about using the RSV in the RCIA process (as I agree that it is a better version for teaching), she said the New American Bible would still be a better starter in RCIA-she pointed out that the NAB is far closer to what the catechumens and candidates will be hearing at Mass.


I'll have much more to say about this month's formation in the days ahead-it was a very spiritually rich and deeply fulfilling experience.