Psalm Despatch #2Father Abbott and the Problem Psalms

Last year, while on a retreat at New Norcia (a monastic community just 132km from Perth), I spotted a notice on the pin-up board in the Guesthouse Parlour relating to 'Problem Psalms'. In an edition of the Benedictine's periodic magazine, 'Friends', the head of the community, Father Abbot Placid Spearitt (left), wrote further about both the notice and the Problem Psalms—Psalms that make us a little uncomfortable and mess with our safe notion and dimensions of God.


Some Friends of New Norcia have never been to New Norcia and some have not been since I persuaded the brethren to allow me to put up the following notice in the church and outside the monastery oratory:

Problem Psalms
You may be distressed by some negative and destructive things said in our psalms and other scriptures.
We have trouble with them too, but we keep using them, because:
• they show us the very slow progress made by Jewish and Christian people in the past in understanding themselves and the world in relation to God;
• they make us think more deeply about the things that are wrong now in our world, in our country, and in our own hearts;
• they help us to purify our idea of God.
The God we worship is total goodness, offering love and peace to the whole human race.

The worst of the problem psalms is 58 (59), in which the psalmist seems somewhat displeased with those who hold divine power (the princes? the priests?). He invites the Lord to break their teeth and tear out their fangs.

Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime;
like a woman’s miscarriage that never sees the sun…
The just shall rejoice at the sight of vengeance;
they shall bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.
“Truly,” all shall say, “the just are rewarded.
Truly there is a God who does justice on the earth.”

That’s not very nice, and I can understand the decision to censor verses like that when the Roman Breviary was translated for general use after the Second Vatican Council. But when I came to New Norcia I asked for all the cursing verses to be restored for our local psalter.

I am always nervous about any kind of censorship, though I realise some of it is necessary, for instance in restricting access by young children to certain materials. And a few years ago I delivered a lecture to a group of librarians on The Librarian as Censor, reminding them that they all exercise that function every time they make a decision on whether to buy/keep/publicise/hide or cull any given item for/in or from their collections.

But as the notice says, it is important with classical texts of any kind, religious or otherwise, to retain them intact, as evidence of what our barbarous ancestors actually thought, in this case about the nature of God and his relations with his chosen people on the one hand and the people he didn’t choose on the other hand. Our ancestors’ ideas were very limited indeed and we need to exercise our interpretive powers when using their writings. Most of the psalms would be less than 3000 years old, so we’ve come a long way in a short time in our understanding of God and his dealings. But we haven’t come the whole distance and we need to go on refining for ourselves the crude ideas of former ages.

We also need to be aware that our understanding is also very limited and will for sure be judged barbarous in its turn by generations to come. CS Lewis, in his introduction to the English translation of St Athanasius on The Incarnation of the Word of God (London 1944), remarks that in every age both sides of any controversy are secretly united by a great deal of common assumptions: they share a blindness that can only be overcome by reading old books, which also make mistakes, but not the same mistakes as those that belong to that particular time. “To be sure,” he adds, “the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately, we cannot get at them.”

I hope you and I don’t agree with the anti-Semitic sentiments of Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. But that’s no reason for not reading it and performing it as it stands, preferably with a discussion session to follow. Monasteries and their guesthouses, fortunately, are great places for discussions provoked by liturgical texts and homilies.

Reproduced with the kind permission of the designer of New Norcia's Friends magazine (with a more legitimate permission to follow)