Daily Song

The Rule of St. Benedict devotes twelve chapters on the daily order of the Psalmody for Benedictines. We gather morning and evening to chant the beautifully poetic Psalms of David.  As the bell rings and invites us to come into God's holy presence, we stop all work we are doing, whether finished or not, to come together "to sing the Psalms in such a way that our minds are in harmony with our voices"~ Rule of Benedict, Ch. 19.  As we come to Morning Prayer, we may still be in sleepy mode; when we come to Evening Prayer we may be tired from the activity and challenges of the day.  But there is something about this gift of sacred pause that reminds us that we are here to do God's holy work of prayer.  As the organ intones the first line of the Psalm, we ask God to awaken our hearts and minds to listen attentively to each word of revelation.  There are times that we might chant an entire Psalm and then realize our minds were on some other planet.  There are times we catch a phrase we never heard before.  There are times we truly connect with God as a line jumps out at us and we know it is meant for us.  Kathleen Norris, in her book The Cloister Walk, describes this experience well-"I found that, even if it took a while-some prayer services I practically slept through, others I seemed to observing from the planet Mars-the poetry of the psalms would break through and touch me.  I became aware of three paradoxes in the psalms:  that in them pain is indeed"missed-in Praise," but in a way that takes pain fully into account; that though of all the books of the Bible the psalms speak most directly to the individual, they cannot be removed from a communal context; and that the psalms are holistic in insisting that the mundane and the holy are inextricably linked."

The Psalms are full of an array of emotions. They can be uplifting or they can be full of darkness.  They can be joyful or they can be sad.  They can make us happy or they can make us melancholic.  The Psalms reflect all of our life experiences.  They are as timely today as they were in the time of David.  The words of the Psalms seep into the very core of our being.  They become part of our life's journey and stay with us throughout the day.  In the midst of our daily work, our private prayer, our conversation, a line or word we chanted may suddenly jump from out of nowhere, and we know this is God's gentle whisper.  "Benedictines become so close to the psalms that they become...like a heartbeat...Internalizing the psalms in this way allows contemporary Benedictines to find personal relevance in this ancient poetry."(Norris, The Cloister Walk) 

So day in and day out we come to sing our gratitude for God's call, our longing for a deeper relationship with God, and our cry for a peaceful world.  We pray for ourselves, for the world, and for those unable to pray. Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister (The Rule of St. Benedict,Insights for the Ages)sums it up perfectly: "Prayer...if we sing praise wisely, or well, or truly, becomes a furnace in which every act of our lives is submitted to the heat and purifying process of the smelter's fire so that our minds and our hearts, our ideas and our lives, come to be in sync, so that we are what we say we are, so that the prayers that pass our lips change our lives, so that God's presence  becomes palpable to us."

"O search me, God,

and know my heart.

O test me and know my thoughts.

See that I follow not the wrong path

and lead me in the path of life eternal."

Psalm 138





"That in All Things God May be Glorified."