This post is written by John Buchanan, Pastor Emeritus, Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago.
Lectio Divina
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Tag Archives: Psalm
Verse – We never saw the stars
In memory of Rev. Milton Carothers
As two Protestant pastors, we had no
desire to become eremites, but went
to the monastery to try to slow
our hectic campus lives in a retreat.
The Benedictine Retreat Master split
us quickly. I was sent to spend the week
with an old monk–a former architect–
who now designed the gardens for his work
(all of the men must sweat as well as pray.)
We carried rocks; he talked incessantly.
Inside the borders made of stone, each day
we’d pull the sinweeds (never silently.)
At all the common meals there was no talk
allowed–and in our cells, we were alone,
of course. At 3 a.m. the bells would wake
us for a walk inside the walls (of stone
also) to sing, to pray the Psalms each night.
We saw no sky: stained glass kept out starlight.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana IL
Editor’s note: I know Milton only through Steve’s tribute to him, but those who have served as campus ministers intuitively understand each other in ways that are unique t those who minister within the walls of the ivory tower. Milton, Steve and I share that history. Milton served in North Carolina, Steve in North Carolina and Champaign-Urbana, IL, and I in Wisconsin, New York, and Ohio. Like Milton and Steve, I have known the need to retreat to the Benedictine retreat center to restore my soul in the solitude and rhythms of Benedictine community.
Although I’ve never risen to pray the Psalms within the walls of stone at 3:00 a.m., I’ve often found myself awake within the starless walls of stone my hardened heart has built. Sometimes at 3:00 a.m. I’m lost among the sinweeds. A Psalm rises up within me to melt the stone, release me from the inner prison, remove the starless plastered ceiling. “When I consider the works of your hands, the moon and the stars which Your fingers have made, what is man that You think of him… and yet” and yet.
A Song for each kind of day
Scheduling Calendar - different kinds of days
Two years ago during my step-daughter’s final months with terminal cancer, I spent three days in quiet reflecton at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, MN.Worshiping with the Benedictines was part of the structure of my day, the chants and readings opening space for fresh air to enter my angry soul…except for…the Psalms. Outrageously violent, vindictive, intolerant, self-righteous…horrible expressions of emotions I had gone there to revoke.
One day following morning prayer, I asked my Benedictine spiritual guide “Why do you read them aloud? Over and over again. They’re horrible.”
“Yes,” he replied, “because they’re real.” And words to this effect: “All those emotions are in us. Every one. Only if we recognize and remember can hate be transformed into love, fear into trust, self-centeredness into compassion. The gospel makes no sense unless it is a word spoken directly into these parts of ourselves we wish weren’t there, the sides of us we deny or from which we take flight into illusions of perfection.”
The words of another Benedictine, Dom Sebastian Moore of Downside Abbey in England, had hit the mark once before during the greatest personal crisis of my life – a time filled with the greatest joy and the greatest sorrow at the very same time. The words are heavily underlined in my copy of Moore’s The Crucified Jesus Is No Stranger. They were a lifeline to a drowning man.
“We have to think of a God closer to our evil than we ever dare to be. We have to think of God not as standing at the end of the way we take when we run away from our evil in the search for good, but as taking hold of us in our evil, at the sore point which the whole idealistic thrust of man is concerned to avoid.”
Or, as Steve concludes his poem, “there is a Psalm for each one of our days.” Here’s the poem.
“A Song for Each Kind of Day”
– Steve Shoemaker, April 12, 2012
One Hebrew word for “god” was “jah.”
(It was a time of many words
for god–and many gods.) To say
“hallel” was for all to sing praise,
so HALLELUJAH meant “Praise God!”
(or “Thanks to you, oh God!”– for some
words could be truly translated
more than one way.
And so, a Psalm, or Song, that offered thanks or praise
might well be paired with a lament:
a cry of pain from one who prays
for help, relief, from gods who sent
disaster. (But, of course, some Psalms
wisely acknowledged that some wrongs
were caused by those who sang the songs!)
There is a Psalm for each one of our days…
Views from the Edge 