Praying the Psalms

There's a common worry that praying someone else's words is second-rate — that "real" prayer must be spontaneous. The Psalms answer it. Some days your own words flow; other days grief or exhaustion or plain emptiness leaves you with nothing, and on those days the Psalms are words held out to you like a hand. You start by borrowing them. Then, somewhere in the middle of "The Lord is my shepherd," you notice you mean it — and the borrowed words have become yours. Christians have always prayed this way: the Psalms are the backbone of the monasteries' daily prayer, of the Liturgy of the Hours, of the Anglican daily office, of countless hymns and worship songs you already know.

Read far enough and you'll hit psalms that ask God to break the teeth of the wicked — and worse. Don't skip them too fast. They are the prayers of people who had been genuinely wronged, and their first lesson is where rage belongs: spoken to God, not swallowed, and not acted out. The psalmist hands the case over — "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord" (Romans 12:19) — which is precisely what makes letting go possible. You may also find that the angry psalms give you words to pray honestly about real evil in the world; a faith that can't name injustice to God has nothing to say to most of human history. Pray them for the world's victims, and let them teach you the difference between handing anger to God and nursing it.

Don't start at Psalm 1 and grind forward — the Psalms are a medicine cabinet, not a novel. Start with the psalm that matches today (the list below maps feelings to psalms), and pray one a day. Psalm 23 if you're unsure. Within a few weeks you'll have a handful of lines by heart, and they'll start showing up on their own — in the waiting room, in the dark, in the moment of relief — which is exactly how the Psalms have always worked.