The Psalm Project

In this episode, GSE shares the special presentation ‘Liturgy of the Hours and the Psalms’ by Sisters Elizabeth Brennan sgs and Elizabeth Murray sgs. Originally presented at the Mission Leaders Conference, this powerful session provides insights into the Prayer of the Church, the communal prayer that plays a vital role in the spiritual life of Benedictines and many others.

The presentation launches ‘The Psalm Project’ developed by Gabrielle Sinclair and Elizabeth Brennan as another tool of communio, that we may sing in one voice.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_04 0:00

Welcome to Good Samaritan Education's podcast. Community. My name is Gabrielle Sinclair, and I'll be your home. Today, our episode takes a different quote from our regular conversations. I'm going to share with you a session that was recorded as part of the recent Mission Ladies Conference. The session was entitled Liquidity of the Hours and the Psalms, presented by Sisters Elizabeth Broman and Elizabeth Murray. The context of this question, and indeed for sharing it with you, a broader audience, is to provide a better understanding of the hours, often called the prayer of the court. This form of communal prayer that quote the life of religious and lay people across the world comes from the desert fathers and mothers of the form and formalized by Benedictins rule. However, I'll leave the history and the explanations to Elizabeth. And indeed, the systems of the good marking. A while ago, I enlisted Elizabeth Brennan to help me in what I've been referring to as the sound project. Together we have created the collection of sounds coming from 150 down to house with five canticles and a few doctors. From this collection, along with one of them, it is my hope that we'll get to know these particular sounds so that when we come together as a community, we can sing with one voice. I hope you enjoy this refreshing and informative look at the Psalms.

SPEAKER_02 1:57

We have been preparing liturgies and executing liturgies for most of our lives. That's our background. Not so much philosophers of liturgy, but very much practitioners. So wanting people to be able to pray during the exercise of liturgy, during the action of liturgy. So the title reads Pleading, Cursing, Praising, Praying with the Psalms. That title is not mine, but it came from a Benedictine sister in American, Irene Nolan. It's a wonderful little book, Pleading, Cursing, Praising. And that's particularly what the Psalms do. The church is committed to praying these Psalms. And probably the main time we all pray a Psalm is at Sunday Mass, at the responsorial psalm. But for Elizabeth and I, we've been praying these psalms morning and evening for most of our lives. So we do feel familiar with them. And they do lead us to prayer. So the first point on that page says the Egyptian girl and her book of Psalms. And there's an image of the Egyptian girl's book of Psalms. And just to tell you the story about it, in 1984, that well-thumbed complete book of Psalms, it's bound in wood, you can see, bound in wood and leather, was found buried under the head of a little girl, was buried more than 1600 years previously. So it's a fourth century document in the 300s, was in a poor cemetery in Egypt. It's the oldest complete book of Psalms that's ever been found. 490 parchment pages written in ink, all of the Psalms written in ink, bound between those wooden covers and stitched with leather. Tied to that book, there was a tiny key of life, and it was carved from bone, and it was attached by a leather thread. That key, it's called the Ankh, is a symbol of life from ancient Egypt. And it was eventually incorporated into the Christian cross. There's no body on the Ankh Cross. As in the Western tradition, for a thousand years we never had a corpus on the cross. We had glorious crosses with jewels, very bright colours, which spoke of resurrection and hope. And the Egyptian church was very strong on resurrection theology. This was an ancient Jewish symbol which spoke of life and unlocking the mysteries of life. And the Christians take it on, and that's the shape of the cross that was tied to this little girl's book of Psalms, carved in bone, hers was. So it would seem obvious that this girl had a special affection for the book of Psalms, and that's why her parents placed it in the coffin with her. It would also seem that this book of Psalms and this cross are part of this child's faith, the parents' faith and the community's faith. And I imagine it happened with a few children and people who died. They were buried with what was so important in the living of their Christian lives. I think the only thing to say about the Anchor Cross is just to remember that point that it's about unlocking the Christian mystery. So when the Egyptian Christians put the book of Psalms and the cross together, that's what they're talking about, unlocking our Jewish tradition of prayer, but we are allying it with our new Christian beliefs that come from Jesus. And we know that this tradition has lasted through the ages, the unlocking of the mystery. The Psalms were so precious that the early Jewish Christians they never added their own book of prayer to the New Testament. There was never a new collection of prayer from the time of Jesus. They continued to pray the prayer that they were used to praying, but interpreting it so often in the light of Jesus' life and his gospel message. For both of us today, Jews and Christians, the Psalms hold a primary position in our canons of scripture. And they're about conversing with God directly, directly addressing God. For example, this line, God, hurry up and help me. I love that. Later on in the Psalm, it says, we are in the pits. Or you can get something like, praise the Lord across the heavens from the heights, all you angels, heavenly beings, sing praise, sing praise. So they're not just words on a page, but they're words that penetrate the heart. And so they inform our daily lives. And I think most importantly, they offer us the opportunity for transformation, for conversion. You know, we're all on the way to being Christian. None of us are Christian. We are all on the road to becoming Christ, becoming Christian. We all need transformation and conversion every day of our lives. So what else do the Psalms do? They teach us about how to live. We often in the Psalms hear God's voice. And that voice is sometimes challenging, it's sometimes comforting, it's sometimes gentle, but sometimes it's roaring. They're very gutsy psalms. They're very incarnational, very gutsy. They are the work of God. And I think God's work in us, God is the initiator of our transformation, our returning to Him. It's God's work in us, and it's our work to be godly. So it works, and we know that, both ways. God's work in us, God's initiative, God's call, and our response, our work to be godly. They were the prayer of Jesus, the spirituality that formed him. Like any good Jew, he would have prayed them every day. In Melbourne, in St. Francis, there's a wonderful sculpture by Pauline Clayton, who's done a sculpture at Pennant Hills and at St. Scholastica's and Santa Maria. Pauline has done a sculpture of Joseph, Saint Joseph, teaching Jesus the Psalms. Jesus is a young boy. It's a wonderful sculpture, and it sits on the floor, and you can look at it at eye level and walk around it. And I've always been touched by that. Joseph and Mary would have taught Jesus his prayer, the psalmody. There are many, many references that Jesus makes in the stories he tells and in what's written about him that he was familiar with the Psalms. For example, on the night before the crucifixion, when he's in the Garden of Gethsemane, it says, after they had sung the psalms. Lovely phrase. After they had sung the psalms, on the cross, it's the last word that Mark puts on the lips of Jesus. Jesus sings from Psalm 21, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? We sing it on Good Friday, don't we? My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? And his very last words on the cross are from Psalm 31, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. The next verse is not recorded by the evangelist. The next verse says, You have redeemed me, faithful God. And I think that gives us an insight into the mind of Jesus. He says, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. You have redeemed me, faithful God. You've been faithful to me. Jesus still might not understand why he's giving up his life, but he believes that God is his end point, his major relationship, his loving relationship. So I think we've said enough about in the Psalms, we hear our own voice, the voice of humanity crying out, the voice of our brothers and sisters, their raw prayer. God, hurry and help me, shut your eyes to my sin. And this one, I've I've thought of this one a lot when we're so mindful of the Palestinians and the Palestinian Christians at the moment who are suffering so much. You have laid me in the depths of the pit in regions that are dark and deep. I am drowned beneath your waves. Sometimes there'd be some teachers on your staff who would be experiencing that serious depression, despair, the students who suffer from breakup of their parents' relationship, serious depression, and suffering and hurt for them. It's all named there in the Psalms. So always in this community of ours, we do all these things. We cry out in pain, we complain, we judge. Every couple of minutes we judge, and the Psalms pick that up. You know that anthropologist Rene Girard, he says that every three minutes in our minds we are making a judgment against someone else. It seems to be how humanity is. But you hear it in the Psalms, the psalmists complain to God, then they give thanks, then they are learning to trust, they're singing praise. Whatever about the Psalms, God is with us there. God is with us in the serious depression and in the suffering, walking with us, crawling with us, struggling with us, leaping for joy with us, etc. God always there with us. The Psalms can be described in many, many ways. They are prayers, they are poetry, they're all poetry, their shouts, shout praises to the Lord with all that I am, their cries and laments where we say to God, you know, where are you? I'm calling on you day by day, I call by night, I find no rest. Or their cosmic chants. God, you are in relationship with the whole of creation. That's a lovely poem at the end. I bless you, Lord my God. You feed springs that feed brooks rushing down ravines, water for wild beasts, for wild asses to drink, birds nest nearby and sing among the leaves. So the psalms, sort of all of those at once. We can sometimes name a psalm that has a particular feel and theme as a lament or a psalm of confidence or a shout of praise or thanksgiving, but sometimes there's a mixture. Sometimes they'll move from lament to praise, like a reorientation, often within the psalm itself. Elizabeth and I have both heard of this story. After Vatican II, some monasteries decided not to sing. They used to always sing, and some of them decided not to sing. And I can't remember where this monastery was, but it was somewhere in Europe. And they stopped singing and they recited the psalms each day, and the monks gradually started to get sick. Some of them got depressed, some of them weren't well, and the abbot was getting so worried. He thought, Well, we've never had this problem before. Why has it suddenly appeared? And eventually he got a psychologist in, and the psychologist worked out. It was because they were not singing. He said there's something about singing that is healing for us, that is therapeutic, the one voice.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

And the Jews knew that because most of the psalms in the Psalter are clearly meant to be sung. And you get those directions at the beginning of each psalm, you know. Don't ask me to quote what they are at the moment. And as Elizabeth said, Jesus would have grown up singing psalms. So the way that we have, or where we've got to as a congregation, is to use Howard Hughes' psalm tones. He's an American priest. And we found them very useful, very doable, aren't they? You know, when we come together, we can just do it, and we're from all over the place. Not that every community is able to do it, they might do it to a limited extent, but there's something to be said for communal experience together. And there's nothing like singing to keep us together. If you say something together, we have voices of different pitches and we have different ways of speaking or of emphasizing something, you ask you people to chant it even just on a one note, then immediately it changes. There's something that lifting the voice together does. Anyway, I'll now be proven right or wrong. Because what I'm going to Psalm 23, as it's has already been mentioned by Elizabeth, is one that in various forms has been so popular in Christian history and obviously in Jewish history as well, and it's been changed into a hymn form in you know Cremand. There's various forms. But what I'd like you to do is to look at the third verse. Sorry, I'm skipping out the part that you know, but let's look at the third verse, and I'd just like you to say it together. You spread and say it rule before me as my foes look on.

SPEAKER_04 16:03

You soothing my head with oil, my cup is more than.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

Oh, they've done that so well. Okay, what I'm going to ask you to do now is to do exactly the same thing on a note. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

You spread the table before me. As my falls will gone. You soothe my head with oil. My cup is more than full.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

You are amazing. And it was prayerfully done too. It was at a good pace. Anyway, now I'm going to play you the tone that's up the top there, and Paul off the cuff is going to sing that verse to you. Okay, and no slowing down on the last line of anything. So let's do that.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

You spread a table before me. As my first you're amazing.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Just do the last verse.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

Goodness and love will take me every day of my life. I will show you. Aren't they amazing? They're wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

I don't think I need to do any more. Yes. Okay, let's do it with the accompaniment. And again, just those two stains as well. The last thing you want is for a heavy accompaniment. The accompaniment just sit simply acts as a bridge. You know, because you're traveling with the rhythm of speech. And as you've already worked out, the little underlines are just that's not for emphasis. The emphasis is on the last stressed syllable of the line, which in the first case you spread a table before me. For is the last stressed syllable. So the underlines are meant to prepare you for that stress. It just tells you where you go with those two little what we call preparatory notes. You can see, just have a look there. You've got your reciting note, the one you say all the words on, and your end note. They're the two important ones. And then the two little black-headed things are preparatory to get you to that final syllable. So they're not stressed. Now together let's do verse four. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

You spread a tape before me. That's my first look on my car is more handful.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Don't drag it, that's the other thing. Next one. As long as I shall live. Now back to verse one. And the reason we did, I delayed verse one is because it's got five lines and we've only got a four-line tone. So let's call these four sections A, B, C, D. Okay. So you've got the Lord is my shepherd, I need nothing more. Now on the third part, part C, you've got two lines. And at the end of the first line, you've got a comma. Always acknowledge your end of line punctuation if it's just a line that's being carried on to the others. Okay? There's no punctuation there, you just carry on. If you've got two lines to go to the thing. So you give me rest in green meadows, setting me near calm waters is uh as you see it there. Let's do it, please. The Lord is my shepherd.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

The Lord is my shepherd. I need nothing more. You give me rest in green meadows, setting me near calm waters. Where we like my spirit. I feel like you might have to comfort me.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

Well done. Thank you. Elizabeth back to you. Thank you. Very good, folks.

SPEAKER_02 21:31

Nice to have a little song in between, isn't it? Helps and hints on how to pray. Sacred moments and sacred pauses. Do you remember the diagram that Christine put up of Benedict's Day starting from the night and going around? It's that sense that Benedict had that you pause during the day to be mindful of God and your journey on the pilgrimage way. So when you're doing it in school, it's like a sacred pause or a sacred moment, always about being mindful of God. And she mentioned humility too, that sense of it's always God who is God, and I am the creature before God. So I come before God as the creature to lament or give praise or shout praise or whatever. So they're sacred moments, sacred pauses. Every prayer that you have in your colleges needs a shape. The mass has a shape, doesn't it? The mass has a shape. Elizabeth and I went to a conference, a liturgy conference at the end of last year in Melbourne, it was, and it was a very fine conference with lots of scholars. We weren't actually scholars, we always call ourselves the practitioners. But there were wonderful things reflected upon there. One of them, one of the major ones, was that our liturgies are far too wordy. Even the Mass, we add stuff on. We put two and three hymns at communion. We keep adding stuff on. They're far too wordy, and we will never be able to create good prayer while we just continue doing that. We have to pull back on the wordiness of the prayer. We've got wonderful rituals in Catholic liturgy, wonderful rituals. We've got wonderful gestures to keep using those, but to pull back on the text. So that it's a limited text we work with, more like a poetic text that gets the message across in a lean way. All right, so the prayer needs a shape, and we want to do it without too much text. So my suggestion would be that the first thing you do when you come into your oratory, your chapel, is that you make the sign of the cross. It's making the sign of the cross prayerfully. You know, I taught in Nambour for a while at a Coed college there, and I remember this boy came in year seven. We had these assemblies, and after a couple of weeks he said, What's this that everyone does at the beginning of the prayer? And it was a good lesson to me. I thought, you know, always, as long as you model and you get them, sometimes that might be your only prayer. You might just do it in the classroom. You just might have the sign of the cross as the prayer, silence afterwards, and nothing else. But to get the students to do it very mindfully and for you to do it mindfully too. So if I were going to do the psalms, I'd then have a little invitation, a little something that brings them into the prayer. You don't need to have it written out, you don't need to have it on a screen. You say it, and they say it after you, and I'll do that now. O God, come to our aid. Sing and shout praises to the Lord our God. That marks the beginning of the formal samedi, I suppose, but it just gives it a little feel for the beginning. Sometimes you could also be freewheeling with a text yourself, but be very careful that it's not too wordy. But if someone, like if a student is very sick or has an accident, or someone dies, a parent dies, you might want to say, let us bow our heads in silence as we remember Xavier, whose mother died last week. Just have some silence. And then you go into the psalm. If you're wanting to introduce, just say exactly what you need to say. Don't go on with your own reflections, our own devotional commentary. Now, I'm not going to talk about the psalms as such because we'll do these with Elizabeth, but I have said about the doxology at the end of the psalm. The doxology is actually a Jewish practice. In many of the psalms, they praise God, doxar, glory to you. They praise God at the end of the psalm. And the Christian community from the early church picked up exactly that practice, praising God at the end of the psalm. We've got two doxology samples, the glory be to the father you know. And then let's read the second one together. All honour to God, the giver of life, to Christ the risen one, and to the spirit, bond of love, glory and praise forever. Amen. I have to tell you that when we were doing our book of hours, we went to a lot of trouble, Elizabeth, didn't we? About the doxologies. Because you know yourselves when you're working with priests or bishops or whatever, you have to be so careful about the theology and what it says. And we had those checked and double-checked by a couple of very good theologians who gave us A. Just so that you know they're good sound doxologies. Now, the next thing is to have a scripture reading, and I've said a short scripture reading. Recently, Elizabeth and I were at a funeral at Concord, and if any of you have ever been to Concord, that's Father Paul Crowley, who is a wonderful presider of prayer. Now, this was an adult who died, but the gospel he read from the children's lectionary, and I wondered if he always did that. I was just interested because it's more concise and it's absolutely legal. But if you were having this moment of prayer, say at your RE class and you were having it at midday, and so you're going over to a chapel if you've got it, or some other room, or even if it's in the classroom, I would go for a short scripture reading, never long. Children's spans of attention are extremely short. You want them to get a word. It's just a word you want them to get. And then I've got silence after the reading. Now, what I should have done is printed that in the largest printing possible, because that's what we've lost so much from our prayer, the moments of silence. You know, in the Mass there are many moments of silence. Do you ever get a presider who's comfortable with giving us a moment of silence? Very rarely. Liturgy is work, it's the work of the people. That's the meaning of the word. It's the work of the people. So we're saying, we're singing, we're kneeling, we're sitting, we're standing, we're bowing. It's work, we're doing. We need moments of silence for prayer. That's when we actually address God, and God has time because we're suddenly silent, God has time to address us. I think the silence is so important. Not long silences, because if we make them long, they all get fidgety, don't they? That you know, so it's it's getting the right amount of time for the silence, probably not even a minute, but that is the moment of prayer. That moment, the silence. And I couldn't encourage you enough to build that in. And then we have the intercessions. Just a line to introduce them. Let us bring our hopes and needs to God as we pray. Make sure they're not long, that people are able to hear, because intercessions are still the liturgy of the word. People need to be able to hear, don't let them mumble. And you probably know lots about the intercessions. Mostly we would begin them with four, peace in the world, especially in the Middle East, that sort of thing. But in this little series, and I know a number of you might have it, give us this day, they have another approach to intercessions, which is very good. It's short, but they use verbs to start. For example, grant good health to Pope Francis and guide his leadership by the light of the Holy Spirit. So grant the verb. Or the next one, attend to the grief of those who've lost businesses, homes, or loved ones. Give justice to the oppressed and the security of love to orphans. Give wisdom, shine your light, and so on. I think they'd be good to use those verbs at the beginning of intercessions and just short, crisp prayers. Schools that use this prayer, children's daily prayer. I don't know if any of you have ever used this. This is from about grade four, probably, four, five, six, seven, and eight, you could use it. It comes out every year. Now they don't sing these psalms, but the children who use this book, they're taught to lead the prayer. And that's a whole method of liturgical prayer. And I think you can easily do it in the colleges using that little shape there that I've suggested, which is the shape of our liturgy of the hours. That is the shape. So we're not creating anything new. It's simple and it's attractive, I think. And the music makes it even more attractive. Okay, let's move on to the concluding prayer we're up to now in the shape of our prayer.

SPEAKER_00 31:13

Oh, could I just mention something that just occurred to me in your doing of something like the tone of the psalm we've just done? To help them get into it, you know, there's lots of questions you would understand, you could ask, you know, is there a word there that really strikes you? Is there a line there that you think that you could pray? You know, there's lots of images there, shelter and rock and fortress and whatever else. And what are their images of God? Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 31:40

That's important too. Like this is a long journey, it's not something that you will go and introduce next week and it will be successful. You've got to build this up, I think. So the concluding prayer I've got a couple of examples. First one, loving God, you embrace us with your mercy. Help us to listen when you call us, give us courage to do what you ask and keep us close to your heart. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen. There's a way of writing these concluding prayers, and this is the most traditional way, that first one. You first of all name something that God does. You either thank God or name God for what God has done. Loving God, you embrace us with your mercy. Then you ask. And I've got a couple here, I'll read them in a moment. But the second prayer, it's a different approach, and you probably wouldn't do this too much. It still has the acknowledgement of God, but notice it comes at the end. So this prayer says, as sheep are guarded by the watchful shepherd, as chicks are tended by the mother hen, as eaglets are sheltered by the wings of their mother, we rest secure in the arms of God. For constant love, O God, we praise you. For unending mercy, we give you thanks. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. It's a very attractive prayer, isn't it? Picking up the images. Elizabeth and I both had a teacher in the United States, Kevin C. Saltz, I don't know if you remember. He came to class every day with a little piece of paper like this, and on it was written the prayer for the day, a concluding prayer, a collect, an opening prayer. That's what he had. Now he was the most talented man. And sometimes, you know, a couple of the students would say, Look, why do you have to write it out every day? And he would say, I never trust myself to be faithful to the prayer. I might wander off somewhere. And I was always wishing he'd published those prayers. He wrote them out of the daily gospel, and he was very conscious of what was going on in the world. And that's what we try to do. Be conscious of the gospel message. And the message maybe it comes from his scripture reading, but maybe it comes from what's happening in the world today. Just before we go, well, the blessing's clear enough at the end. I just put that music blessing at the end because you you a lot of you might know that, and we'll sing it in a moment. If you or a student are leading prayer, stand up straight. Like it's prayer, you have to give it the dignity it deserves. It's not just slouching in from the you know the swimming pool or whatever. So that the person who's leading the prayer is acknowledged as a minister. This next point, I couldn't stress it enough, slow everything down. You know, rarely, I think, do students practice their reading ten times or so before they get up, and that they don't rush up and walk, that they go with, you know, deliberate steps walking and lighting the candle. I think that can be a lovely gesture if you've got a taper, you know, that they walk up and they light. That can be the beginning of your prayer that silences everyone, that lovely gesture. Emphasize everything a bit. Well, reading it's the slowing down. And when they're bowing, don't let them just do this. If I didn't have the broken arm, I'd get up and do it, you know. But teach them how to bow and not be frightened of it. Yes, you can do it. Is is it a bow for after the word or is it about to I think it's it's a generous bow. I wouldn't distinguish. Go from the waist down so that but most of them will just nod their heads. Teach them how to bow, you know, the whole class. And when signing, and we talked about this when signing, or if you're getting them to sign each other, and the blessing, that you do it deliberately. And the other thing is the invitation, if you've got a student doing it, get the student to practice that invitation, the reading, the concluding prayer, and the blessing. And the important point is that you know you're leading people in prayer. Okay, let's sing.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

May God bless and keep you, may God shine on you. May God be kind to you and you.

SPEAKER_04 36:45

A way of bringing community together. So equip with simple structures that can be replicated anywhere of fucking crap on the coming months. We will be rebooking our community to join with the song of the code and the song of our dog. I hope you're humility, a word or for inspiring for your dog. Continuing for your dog with a doctor of holy or doppy, like the transforming trouble of hospitality UI, inspiring you with melody and compassion to go and do my clock.