Introduction: The Hidden Wisdom of Psalmody
The alarm goes off at 3:09, a good three hours before dawn will break over this Colorado mountain valley. I throw on my clothes, drive the mile or so to Saint Benedict’s Monastery, and am in my seat in the chapel by 3:29, just under the wire, to join the monks for vigils, their traditional night prayer.
Except for a flickering candle beneath an icon and the backlit stained-glass window on the far wall, the chapel is dark. The monks, in white robes, have gathered silently on benches in the very back of the church. As the hall clock sounds a single chime, Brother Thomas intones the psalm verse, “O Lord, open my lips,” and the brothers respond, “And my mouth will declare your praise.” Then, to the unison chanting of Psalm 134 (“O come bless the Lord, all you who fear the Lord”), the brothers move into the chapel itself, their white robes occasionally catching the play of light from the candle and window. It is like light emerging and disappearing again into darkness—mysterious, silent.
The service unfolds according to an ancient, unhurried rhythm. There is a psalm, a reading from scripture, silence for three or four minutes. Then another psalm, a reading from a commentary (either ancient or modern), and another period of silence. Then a chanted psalm, a spoken psalm, a reading of the Gospel, and a blessing from the abbot. Then the monks silently disperse, either to the refectory for a cup of coffee before the hour-long meditation that will begin at 4:30 or to their cells for individual prayer and lectio divina, a meditative reading and reflection on scripture.
For the twelve brothers of Saint Benedict’s Monastery and the occasional hardy guests who join them, the nightly participation in vigils carries on an ancient tradition that has been handed down in its present form from the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict. In other Benedictine monasteries all over the world, monks are performing the same ritual, rising from their sleep for the “night work” that finds its wellspring in Psalm 130: “My soul longs for the Lord more than the watchmen for the morning.” During the day, the monks will gather again at regular intervals to refresh themselves in prayer and psalmody. At Saint Benedict’s, this takes place at sunrise, before and just after the midday meal, and in the evening just before bedtime. It’s called the Divine Office, the cornerstone of Benedictine monastic life.
For many contemporary people, this monastic fascination with the psalms is intriguing and even uplifting. Nearly everyone who goes on retreat at a monastery gravitates to the chanting of the Divine Office as the high point of their experience. Some speak of a mysterious depth and presence they experience there. Almost all single it out as what makes the monastery feel special, a place apart. Kathleen Norris, in her best-selling book The Cloister Walk, waxes eloquent about the time she spent in monastic choir during her year as an ecumenical fellow at Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota. She succeeds as well as anyone I know in explaining why this monastic program actually works, what mysterious transformative power may be lurking beneath the seemingly arcane practice of chanting the psalms.
I certainly know whereof she speaks. During the years I lived beside Saint Benedict’s Monastery, I was a vigils junkie. The alarm was permanently set for 3:09, and every night for four years, under starry skies or gathering blizzards, I made that mile-long drive and slid into my seat to join the monks in their simple but profound night work. It exerts a magic on the soul that transcends rational explanation.
But bringing the psalms home is quite a different matter! While many other monastic spiritual practices—contemplative prayer, lectio divina, mindful work—have proven themselves entirely adaptable to life beyond the cloister walls, the tradition of sacred psalmody has so far proved very difficult to transplant. While the Divine Office may be the centerpiece of the monastic program of spiritual transformation, it continues to be a hard sell among contemporary lay contemplatives. I suspect there are two major reasons for this, one of them intellectual, the other practical.
Intellectually, many people are puzzled—and frankly, put off—by the insistence on the psalms as the libretti for chanted prayer. The psalms clearly belong to an Old Testament spiritual milieu, and they are often fraught with violence, self-righteousness, and vindictiveness. There is much black-and-white thinking and demonization of the enemy. The teachings seem on a lower level than the teachings of Jesus. How can steeping oneself so intimately in this primitive material bring one to a higher spiritual level? How does it increase compassion and inclusivity? If anything, would it not be better to chant the teachings of Jesus himself or of enlightened Christian masters such as Saint Francis, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, or Saint Therese of Lisieux? Surely working with sentiments of nobility and compassion would be more conducive to transformation than this stubborn insistence on the psalms, historical though they may be.
And practically speaking, the prospect of chanting the psalms may at first look like it takes a steep learning curve for perhaps dubious gain. You do not pick up the practice automatically; it requires a certain musical skill (not as much as you might initially fear, as I’ll try to show in this book, but it’s only honest to acknowledge that the tradition takes a certain amount of work to master). In contrast to most of the other sacred traditions of the world, chanted psalmody may seem wordy, perhaps annoyingly so. One of my friends, a sincere and tolerant Buddhist, voices his impression as follows: “Most chant traditions use a mantra to carry you into an immediate experience of oneness. The Christian tradition is the mechanical chanting of prayers.”
Why this is not so will require a book (this book!) to explain, but considering where my friend is coming from, his point is well taken. If you’re used to chanting as a means of awakening the chakras, quieting the mind, and plunging into an experience of oneness, the Christian tradition is likely to strike you as hopelessly mental and cumbersome. The constant flow of language in the psalms keeps the mind and emotions engaged and seems to thwart what is usually considered to be the primary purpose of sacred chanting, to carry one beyond the realm of thought.
Any or all of these reasons may leave you hesitant to actually engage in the practice of chanting the psalms, despite its pride of place in monastic life. You may even find yourself wondering whether this practice is still relevant in our much more cosmopolitan and interspiritually oriented day and age. To put it bluntly, has the classic tradition of Christian sacred chanting become a spiritual white elephant? Although beautiful and moving from a distance, is it too tied to institutional monasticism and too cerebral and musically challenging to be of real service to today’s contemplative awakening? Has a fifteen-hundred-year-old tradition reached a dead end? And if so, where does one look for a new beginning?
I am not going to answer these questions for you, but if I do my work well, I will at least lay the groundwork by which can make up your mind. When Saint Benedict set out in the early sixth century to found what he called his “school for the Lord’s service,” he made the Divine Office the backbone of his curriculum and spelled out, chapter and verse, the order and protocol of the psalmody. Was this simply piety, or did he know something we’re overlooking? Was there something in the work with those core elements of chanting—breath, tone, attention—that essentially amounted to an underground yoga, an unspoken science of spiritual transformation? Was it merely coincidental that Gregorian chant grew up around this core yoga, with its consistent uplifting thrust toward the higher chakras? Did the psalmody, in spite of or because of its shadow elements, catalyze a process of emotional purification that was prerequisite for further spiritual growth?
To the best of my knowledge, these questions have never been asked before—and they deserve to be. Because psalmody itself, understood as a system of spiritual transformation, is neither so quaint nor so lacking in self-awareness as many people routinely assume. More is going on beneath the surface than meets the eye. As you begin to appreciate the subtlety of this practice, you may be more willing to brave the inevitable learning curve involved in incorporating chanting the psalms as the cornerstone of your own contemplative life.
To be sure, there are winds of change blowing across the map of Christian spirituality. As contemplative practice continues to leap the walls of the monastery and enter the mainstream of modern secular life, new trends and movements toward simplification of the traditional monastic psalmody and even new forms of chanting much more akin to classic mantric chanting are evident. We’ll be looking at some of these new movements in the course of this book. The last word on Christian sacred chanting has by no means been written. One of the most exciting things about the present era is that new currents are coming to life even as I write, and contemplative Christians will have the opportunity to engage and refashion their received tradition with an impact not possible before. The window of opportunity is wide open, and those who are prepared and consistently work with the practice itself will move through it gracefully and with enormous influence on the shape of things to come.
In the final analysis, this is not an either-or proposition. To embrace the new currents stirring in Christian sacred chanting does not require a jettisoning of the old. In fact, as you learn to navigate your way through the practices and protocol of traditional psalmody, you may be surprised to discover that the white elephant is not quite as dead as you first thought. Inscrutable as it may first seem, there is a mysterious vital current that flows between the psalms and Christian inner awakening, each pole revivifying and intensifying the other. This current defies rational description, but it does exist, and you can experience it for yourself as it cuts its channel deeper and deeper into your heart. That experience is what this book is really all about.
