June 23-29, 2024 Exploring the Art of Reading Scripture: Performing the Psalms
What are we imagining we are doing when we are reading scripture?
I have been interested in what it means to “read” texts of Scripture for more than four decades. I even wrote my dissertation on the topic — what it means to read Scripture for the purposes of Christian ethics. Along the way, I have discovered that there is much that people take for granted that I do not. This month’s post has been delayed.
I. Revisitng the Art of Reading Scripture as Performance
I was midway through writing this month’s post when I learned the news that my aunt, JLS had died (May 18, 2024). I was invited to offer a eulogy on behalf of the extended family, which I feel honored to be able to do. It was both a burden and a privilege. For reasons that I will leave aside on this occasion, I chose to read Psalm 63:1-8 as part of my sermon, and I quoted the words of St. Athanasius about what it means to read the psalms (see quotation of the month below). I suspect I would have chosen to use that quote from Athanasius in this post regardless, but the death of my mother’s sister has given me more reason to reflect on what it means for us to perform the psalms and to experience the powerful ways the psalms serve as a mirror — you might say — with which we can learn to read our own lives.
I have been reading books for almost 60 years now. I have some sense of who taught me, and I even recall some of the books that I read in my elementary school years. I have not always paid attention to what I am doing when I am reading a text, but I have given a lot of thought to the matter, particularly when it comes to reading the Bible with communities of Christians as well as on those occasions when the gatherings are with people whose religious identity and affiliation is less well defined.
One of the Book Lovers memes on Facebook provides a reminder of an often overlooked fact. There are different pictures that we carry around with us of the activity of reading. There are details about which we may be tacitly aware. We may be more or less mindful of these matters. Consider the following:
I suppose every picture of reading as a performance can have its oddities. In this case, the parent has fallen asleep. The child looks up. Without more context, we cannot say where the action of reading is.
When I try to put myself in this picture, I recall the transition that occurred in 1989-90 when our daughter (Hannah) discovered her own agency as a reader. She had a “bible story book” that had 10-12 words per page. Initially, I read the book to her and she saw the photos. Over time, she associated the sounds of the words with the pictures and she began to memorize the stories (not because anyone told her that she had to do so but because she loved the stories and/or she wanted to learn the magic of reading. There came a day when she no longer needed her father and mother. She was able to read on her own and yet she retains associations of the relationship with her parents and other people with whom she has learned to read books.
I suspect that she also saw herself [as a potential subject]. in the text of the Bible stories. She was named, of course, for the biblical character in I Samuel. I can still here HCC “read” the sequence of exchanges that occurred in the text about the boy Samuel who responded to the voice in the night only to be told by the priest Eli that he should go back to bed. “I did not call you.” There was both delight in Hannah’s voice as she said those words and a growing sense of wonder about what it means to hear the voice of God calling. What HCC Cartwright experienced in learning to read and perform Scripture is not unusual for people who begin to find their way into the stories that start out as black marks on a white page and over time become spoken words shared by wider companies of people in both religious and secular settings. I had the privilege of doing this with all four of our children (along with my wife Mary), and each time I was reminded of the mysterious manner in which we experience literacy. I do not pretend to fathom all aspects, but I know that some things matter more than others. If we ignore relationships like that between a parent and a child, then we are missing something important.
What I know is we need to pay closer attention to these “pictures” of reading that we carry around with us in our mind. Some of them are better than others. Some of them are misleading. And, of course, some of them are quite old. And if we are honest, we should concede that some of the ways earlier generations of readers of the Bible read particular texts are superior to our modern and post-modern construals of what it means to read a text well. Consider the following simile by Athanasius of Alexandria.
St. Athanasius on Reading the Psalms
“Among all of the books [of the Bible], the Psalter has certainly a very special grace, a choiceness of quality to it well worthy to be pondered; for, besides the characteristics which it shares with others, it has this peculiar marvel of its own, that within it are represented and portrayed in all their great variety the movements of the human soul. It is like a picture, in which you see yourself portrayed and, seeing, may understand and consequently form yourself upon the pattern given. Elsewhere in the Bible you may read only that the Low commnands this or that to be done, you listen to the Prophets to learn about the Saviour’s coming or you turn to the historical books to learn the doings of the kings and holy men; but in the Psalter, besides all these things, you learn about yourself. You find depicted in it all the movements of your soul, all its changes, its ups and downs, its failures and recoveries.” Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus in the collection On the Incarnation, 103. (emphasis in the original)
Although written in the 4th century, in Alexandria, Egypt, I find these words to be true in the year 2024 as I sit in my study reading Psalm 63 or many of the other songs of the Book of Psalms, texts that are 2500 to 3,000 or more years old. In my eulogy, I briefly alluded to the senses in which that may have been true for my aunt and that I know it to be true for myself. Although there is value in offering this kind of testimony either about oneself or in the context of memorial remarks, I also know quite well that there is a way in which we glide over questions of reading performance precisely because to forget the layered nature of reading as a practice.
I have heard many clergy and even a few laypeople cite the Orthodox statement that “the one who sings prays twice.” However much truth there may be in that for folks in the Eastern Orthodox church, there is also a doubling of practice and performance in the art of reading scripture in Western Christianity. We just haven’t paid much attention to the ways that has been the case. For that reason, I invite readers to journey back to the period when reading the psalms was intimately connected with literacy itself. Indeed, there was a time when one of the constitutive purposes of reading was for the purpose of praying the psalms.
II. Revisiting the Medieval Picture of Reading the Psalms
I know of no better way to illustrate my point than to talk about Cassiodorus and Radegund, two quasi-monastics figures whose memories are intertwined with praying the psalms. I hope you will stick around to read my distillations of the roles they placed in the history of reading scripture, but first, let’s begin with the definitions.
First, let me introduce Cassiodorus, the early medieval scribe who more than anyone else prepared the way for the transmission of learning, by creating a technology for reading texts in the absence of institutions for that purpose.
The Roman Empire was crumbling. Cassiodorus (480-575) had held a major post as an administrator in the empire. He was not yet 50 years old. He recognized, perhaps sooner than most Christian leaders that the political chaos that was enfolding them would have long term consequences for how Christian learning would be passed on. When his efforts to engage Pope Agapetus with the project of creating a Christian academic community fell through, Cassiodorus turned instead to the creation of a community that came to be known as the Vivariam.
What do you do when the culture no longer has the capacity to create teachers? To quote Derek Olson, one of the leading scholars of the life and work of Cassiodorus,
“In place of a learned class, [Cassiodorus] offers a self-teaching text. . . . The first book focuses on divine learning — books about Scripture and theology as well as some general reflection about the monastery and what goes on there. The second book lays out a scheme for secular learning and provides a whirlwind tour of the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic (the arts for reading), arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (the mathematical arts).” (85)
Cassiodorus’s Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning stands at the intersection of the world of the monastary and secular learning. “On the one hand, this is a fascinating text because it lays bare the mind of the early medieval Christian bibliophile like no other. On the other hand, it reveals the mind-set of a man who sees a culture in free-fall, no longer capable of crating suitable teachers.” (85) Cassiodorus spent the next four decades of his life writing commentaries on Chrsistian texts and creating the blueprint for how to transmit learning across time and space in a world no longer administered by the Roman Empire. In sum: he was an extraordinary administrator and scholar who knew how to bring forth treasures old and new from the storehouse for Christian and secular purposes.
The figure of “Ezra” found in the Codex Amitianus is believed by some scholars to be Cassiodorus. But even if it isn’t, we know that the organization of the nine volumes on the shelves of that famous picture goes back to him (see April 23-29, 2024), and his book on The Institutions of Divne and Secular Learning provided the instructions for how to pass on the liberal arts and the instructions about scribal activities.
This is the short version of the story of Cassiodorus. There is much more worth sharing about this remarkable figure who helped to figure how how to solve the “technology problem” (to borrow an apt phrase from Derek Olson) that Christians faced in the period after the fall of the Roman Empire. His instructions were used by scribes to copy the nine volumes of the Bible. And monastic communities became workshops for wisdom during a period when universities did not yet exist.
Eventually, cathedral schools developed and with the assistance of Jewish and Muslim scholars particularly in the convivencia of Cordoba and Andalusia, the preconditions for what we known as universities came to exist. But it was Cassiodorus who provided the manual for monastic learning. That he was not a monk is noteworthy, His commentary on the Psalms is at one and the same time a work of Christian piety and the product of secular learning.
Although there is probably no one who played the role that Ezra the Scribe played in bringing together the scrolls of the TaNaKh, Cassiodorus comes close. As the architect of an infrastructure for learning that lasted for centuries, he was one of the greatest examples of what it means to be a Scribe of the Kingdom of God (Matthew 13:52)
Second, you need to know Radegund’s Story of Reading
Once upon a time, there lived a virtuous queen whose husband was a wicked man. I know, this sounds like I am about to tell you the kind of story that takes you into the wispy space of never never land.
I assure you. This is no fairy tale I am about to tell you. In fact, it is a narrative that many otherwise well-educated people have never heard and likely if they did hear it would not be prepared to recognized just how remarkable a story it is.
Radegund was born into the sixth century world of fratricidal conflict that took place in waves as the Franks, Burgundians and Lombards fought one another to see who could control areas western Europe stretching beyond Italy to encompass Gaul. . . . Her father’s brother first betrayed the family and took her into his household when she was till a little girl, but then her uncle was defeated by invaders who took the remaining members of the Thuringian court. At age eleven, she was carried off by one of the conquering leaders of the Frankish kingdom, apparently with the intention that she would become the wife of one of the four sons of the Frankish king, Clovis.
In 540, Clothar took Radegund to be his sixth wife. In this case, the word “took” may actually have a physical sense and not merely a ritualistic force. At that point she was 20 years old. Gossip around the court was that she was a nun. (She never bore children for her husband.) During the nine years she was imprisoned, she learned to read and write as well as to practice the Christian faith.
Midway through the sixth century, Chlothar arranged to have Radegund’s brother killed. He was the last male eligible to assume the Thurungian throne. At this point, Radegund ran away from her husband. Historians have reconstructed the events. She had anticipated that Clothar would likely take this course of action. She was prepared to take strategic actions, and she did so in ways that are astounding when we look back on the very difficult circumstances she faced in that time and place. This is a story that deserves to be well-told, and I have limited access to the original texts and even more limited skills to conjugate Latin texts. I yield to Derek Olson’s distillation.
In the years leading up to this incident, [Radegund] had made the habit of visiting cathedrals, churches and monasteries in the area and made a reputation for herself. Wearing costly clothing and jewelry, she would walk to the main altar and strip down to her simple day-shift, piling the wealth on the altar as a donation; needless to say, bishops and abbots were always eager to receive her and cultivated her friendship. Upon leaving the court, it was the time to call in some favors.
She proposed the establishment of the first religious community for women in the Frankish Empire where she would live according to the Rule of Ceasarius of Arles. In a short time, she was able to produce a letter signed by the host and prelateds. all supporting her plan. It included the most dire threats for any woman who took religious vows and then wished to forsake the community and return to the world and marriage. Conversely, it likewise threatened anathema and damnation to any man who would attempt to remove any of the women from the religious enclosure.
The other letter than Radegund had been looking for was the blessing of Caesareia II of Arles, Caesaria, abbess of a convent in the Visigothic city of Arles, was the successor to the first Caesaria, sister of the influential bishop and theologian Caesarius of Arles. Caesarius had written a a monastic rule for his siter’s community, and in this letter, Caesaria II not only sneds her community’s rule to Radegund as the queen had requested but also gives her advice based on her own experience. In commending the rule, Caesaria wrote this line, which neatly captures three central themes, not just of Caesaria’s and Radegund’s lives and spirituality, but of the time and place. . . “Let none of those [women] entering [the community] not learn letters; let all hold the psalter in memory and, as I have said, be zealous to carry out in all things what you read in the gospel.”
I leave the last word about Radegund to Derek Olson, who as far as I know has done more to make this story available that anyone else in his wonderful book Honey for the Soul about the commentary of Cassidorus Senator on the Book of Psalms, (Liturgical Press, 2017)
Despite the hardships of her life — perhaps because of the hardships of her life — Radegund’s faith remained strong and powerful. Her life story recounts episode after episode focused on care for the sick, the poor, the hungry and neglected. She used her power to create a safe space for herself and other women — rigorous and not without its own challenges to be sure — but a place where learning and faith and female authority would be respected for centuries to come. And her experience of the psalms lies at the center of it all.”
In this case, we know about who Radegund was because there is a community that preserved her memory. So this story is intertwined with traditions of reading practice. However, in addition, there are a few documents that exist (the letters from Ceasaria II, etc.) that make it something more than the lore of an ecclesial community. After Radegund’s death (587) she was buried in a chapel neaar the abbey. In time, her relics started to be venerated. The chapel was renamed for her, and today the parish Church of Radegund exists as a congregation in the city of Poitiers. In fact, according to Derek Olson, this is the oldest Latin document written by a female that we have in the history of Western culture. If that is the case, then it is even more remarkable that the reading the psalms and literacy are co-terminous.
As Olson explains, there was actually a point in early medieval history when a person who was literate was called a psalteratus — to know the psalms. [Honey for the Soul, p.4] Let that sink in. Once upon a time, reading was a performative practice that existed in relation to the chanting of the psalter. Male and female monks were encouraged to memorize the psalms for the purpose of praying the psalms according to specific cycles (weekly, monthly, etc.). Learning to read was for the purpose of making sure that the monk was able to understand what he or she was saying in relation to the good news of the Christian gospel.
Though it be holy and good and laudable that you desire to live by the Bible, there is no greater, better, more precious nor more splendid doctrine than the reading of the gospel. See this, hold this, which our Lord and master Christ taught by words and fulfilled by example, who made so many miracles in a world that they can not be counted, and sustained so many ills from his persecutors, through patience, that can scarcely be believed.
As Olson points out, the psalms and the gospels were “inextricably bound together.” (5) in the pattern of prayers and worship in the monastic communities.
I suspect that many people who have read this far in this month’s post for The Jubilee Reader are genuinely surprised that this could be the case and that they would not have learned about this pattern of reading. I submit that this is precisely the kind of thing that we are most tempted to forget in the context of knowledge acquisition. Those who might remember are those who continue to embody performances of the text.
Although I find that many contemporary Christians forget it, there is actually an extended analogy or “picture” that church leaders have lifted up from time to time to remind clergy and laity what this involves. That is Matthew 13:52 — “the scribes of/for the kingdom of God” — the agents who possessed the requisite skills “to convert the texts of Scripture into oral performance.” Here again is Derek Olson’s fine explication.
“As the liturgy was not able to bear the full volume of Scripture, the two kinds of liturgies centered on three portions of texts that conveyed the most essential material, condensing the scope of the Bible into a set of selections that could be easily contained in three manageable volumees rather than in nine volumes (as with the multivolume Bibles) or one unmanageable volume (the pandects). As a result, the Mass transmitted the gospels containing the outward words and works of Jesus, supplemented by the epistle which excerpted the letters of Paul, the General Epistles, and some of the Old Testament Prophets; the Office focuses on the transmission of the psalms which contained simultaneously the essence of Scripture but also the inner thoughts and feelings of Jesus. Since the Psalms were understood as a microcosm of Scripture, to learn them was to learn the scope of Scripture. Constant repetition of psalms moved them from the realm of textual manuscript cultured into the communal memory of an oral culture. As possessions of communal and oral memory, they also served as the gateway into spoken and Latin language acquisition.” [pp. 48-49]
The priest or liturgical leader of the community was responsible for exercising discerning selectivity as guided by resource such as the lectionaries that would develop across time reflected the cycle of feasts and fasts of the church year. This process was not without complexity and a fair bit of Christian supersssionism of the Jewish traditions associated with reading the Torah, Prophets, and Writings as collected in the Septuagint. But thanks to Cassiodorus and others who brought administrative experience to the church’s “technology problem,” the scribes of the kingdom (Matthew 13:52) — most of which were clergy much some of which were laity who were part of the monastic communities — were able to bring the Word of God (as both oral performance and enacted drama) to the people of God at each assembly of the church for worship and prayer.
Photograph of the Benedictine sisters of Beech Grove at Our Lady of Grace Monastery praying the psalms as they have done every day since 1959 (OLG website)
III. AN ACADEMIC PICTURE from — ca. 1987-88
Once upon a time I wrote a dissertation with the title — Practices, Politics and Performance — words that for those who were part of the “in-group” community of scholarly readers gestured to matters Aristotelian, moral philosophy associated with MacIntyre, and chains of signification associated with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mikhail Bakhtin, and several Cambridge theologians, David Ford, Rowan Williams and Nicholas Lash. The most important word in my title was “performance” and looking back on it, I think that the exercise was flawed in several ways, although I remain proud of the work I did back then, and I loved the experience of graduate study with folks like Stanley Hauerwas, Geoffrey Wainwright, David Steinmetz, and Frederic Jameson. What a privilege to study and learn with some remarkable people.
My efforts to break through the modernist impasse in Christian ethics pertaining to “the uses of Scripture in Christian ethics” were guided by the awareness that too many of the moral arguments (particularly among Protestants) were overdetermined by the Fundamentalist-Modernist split, and too little of the reasoning was theological and/or eccclesial in focus. I was inviting ethicists in the Christian tradition to “get back to the rough ground”— by engaging with actual instances of reading scripture — by paying attention to the fact that interpretation involves perfomance in which we are agents of reading the text. I learned my lesson from Nicholas Lash.
There are some texts the interpretation of which seems to be a matter of. first, ‘digging’ the meaning out of the text and then, subsequently, putting the meanng to use, applying it in practice. That might be a plausible description onf hat someone was doing, who, armed with a circuit diagram, tried to mend his television set. But it would be a most misleading description of what a judge is doing when, in the particular case before him, he interprets the law. In this case, interpretation is a creative act that could not have been predicted by a computer because it is the judge’s business to ‘make’ the law by his interpretation of precedent. What the law means is decided by his application of it.
Lash follows up with a rather understated statement: “What it means to read or interpret a text depends in part, then, on the knd of text is being used. Different kinds of texts call for different kinds of reading.” (38)
This kind of pragmatic understanding of textual performance does not resolve the problem of the interpretation of the Bible in Christian ethics so much as it re-situates the set of conundrums within the context of ecclesial communities where agency is both acknowledged and enjoyed.
Lash’s move, here, with the legal analogy is to get readers to pay attention to the kind of text they are engaging and then to pay even closer attention to how they engage them. From there, he goes on to lead readers to recognize that they are active agents. The following is my favorite paragraph from the essay on “Performing the Scriptures” in his wonderful collection of theological essays, Theology on the Way to Emmaus (1986)
“For even the most dedicated musician or actor, the interpretations of Beethoven or Shakespeare is a part-time activity. Off-stage, the performers relax, go shopping, and dig the garden. But there are some texts, the fundamental form of the interpretation of which is a full-time affair because it consist in their enactment as the social existence of an entire community. The scriptures, I suggest are such texts. This is what is meant by saying that the fundamental form of the Christian interpretation of scripture is the life, activity, and organization of the believign community. The performance of scripture is the life of the church. It is not more possible for an isolated individual to performa these texts that it is for him to perform a Beethoven quarter or a Shakespeare tragedy.” (43)
Lash provides other analogies including the political interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, but for my purposes, the most relevant polity or “peoplehood” is the church. Even so, part of what I love about this extended reflection about reading as performance is that it takes us away from a narrow kind of textuality that tends to forget the ways we move back and forth between oral and written modes of engagement, and the ways that communities exist as social embodiments. I also resonate deeply with Lash’s understanding of the scribal role of the theologian who helps to orient those who are disciples or learners on their way to Emmaus. Jesus is the primary interpreter after Easter according to Luke 24, and we as clergy and laity continue to engage in the Spirit-led activities of interpretation as we make our way forward — to be sure often with stumbles and failures of performance — in space and time.
Without the work of Nicholas Lash, I never would have written the dissertation I completed in 1988. The subtitle of my dissertation was also a bit self-conscious “Toward a Communal Hermeneutic for Christian Ethics.” I would like to think that this verbiage was not so much a display of pretension as the nervousness of a graduate student who was trying to place his brick in that wall of knowledge and was searching for the right kind of prolegomenon to make it possible to lay out an approach that would be more productive. My choice of examples proved to be flawed, some have said, at least for the purposes of persuading people in the guild of Christian ethics. I explored the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition of reading scripture in the context of the Rule of Christ (Matt. 18). The Russian and Greek Orthodox tradition of reading the Bible in relation to the traiditons of eucharistic hospitality and/or philanthropy provided another example of performing the scriptures.
As the outside reader hired by the university press aptly summarized, the dissertation was written for a dozen or so qualified readers in the world (beyond the dissertation committee) who were well-read in the diverse literatures that I had assimilated for my project. Then, as now, my writing projects tended to fly over people’s heads — unless they were familiar with the traditions that I was engaging. I concede that this is an interesting irony for someone who deployed “performative” approach. Even so, I am not alone in the mud puddle of ignorance about the traditions of biblical interpretation that have developed across the centuries. At least I feel a sense of embarrassment about the situation and have tried to repair my ignorance.
It stirred enough interest that for many years I made a half dozen copies of it for 15 years or so before some friends asked if I would let them publish it. So it became available in print in 2006. Since then it has vied for the least best-selling book in the entire tent of Wipf & Stock publishing companies. I mention that here simply because I understand that part of what I explored was the different patterns of signification — some visual, some oral, and still others tactical and visceral — that constituted “chains” of moral and spiritual engagement.
At the time, I wasn’t so interested in notions of “orality” and I had not yet developed an affinity for practices of spiritual formation. Now that I am retired, I am less confident that my efforts to chart a way forward for hermeneutical practice was all that necessary. Perhaps, despite myself, my account remained a formalist proposal (as one reviewer of the published version noted).
On the other hand, I think that the examples from the Russian Orthodox and Anabaptist traditions that I discussed did draw attention to the forms of social embodiment that cannot be set aside if we are going to “search the scriptures” in community with one another. Throughout my career, what I have found to be most telling is the hesitance — often the outright unwillingness — of mainline Protestants to perform scriptural interpretation in the context of covenantal community.
The jury is still out, I think, on the use of the dramatic metaphor of performance htat was introduced forty years or so ago by a succession of theologians and biblical scholars working int he British context. My own use of it was prompted by Nicholas Lash. the biblical scholar N.T. Wright developed his own version of the Shakespearean performance and then a couple of decades ago that amazing priest-scholar Samuel Wells provided a synthesis of these in his brilliant book Improvisation. I don’t know anyone who has exploited this metaphor more than the aforementioned trio, but I am aware that the Shakespeare troupe analogy is, at the end of the day, one picture of reading as performance. Nicholas Lash pointed to others — the performance of a Beethoven symphony,e tc.
I am not at all sure how I would proceed if I were to doing that particular “first work” over. (If ever there was a speculative notion that is sure one!) I do know, however, that the absence of the performance of the psalms from the reading practice of Christian ethics is an indicator of the professional guild’s preoccupation with method.
As much as I wrote back then in opposition to the mainline Protestant preoccupation with formalist approaches to the interpretation and “application” of texts as “moral rules” as opposed to other kinds of “prescriptive uses” (principles, etc.) or more descriptive uses, looking back on it I see that I remained captive to the “picture” of the Christian ethicist as an academic who sat outside the gathered community of faith. No doubt, that is part of what led me to be so intrigued with the African-American Christian tradition’s performatives “uses” of the Bible in Christian ethics in the context of singing the spirituals and the double-voiced patterns of preaching where black clergy and laity had to use words in order to overcome the slave ideologies of the masters who brought in clergy to justify enslavement as if Christianity and slavery could be reconciled. In the end, I could not come to terms with cutting down the manuscript (despite the attractive offer to publish it as a book by a university press). I was motivated by learning and so I kept exploring how this worked in other religious traditions.
I dunno if I could have stretched my poor overloaded brain to include the use of the psalter, which would have entailed exploring the monastic hours of prayer. I suspect that the “cloister” would have proven to be the problem I would have run into, given that it is so obviously from a world of “pre-critical” scholarship, but I remain grateful to have learned about the superiority of pre-critical exegesis from David Steinmetz (who was one of the distinguished members of my dissertation committee).
My limited pastoral experience (two years in rural North Carolina) confirmed my belated recognition in the last semester of seminary that the most important thing that I could be about as a pastor was to pray for my congregation. But it did not resolve my own problem of multitasking. I could not walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. In that respect, I came to admire and in some ways to envy those scholars (AKMA) who were able to embody the pastoral roles while also carrying out the work of teaching and scholarship. Now that I am retired, I am a bit less self-conscious. It helps that I no longer have so many “hats” to wear in the communities that overlap in uneven ways. That doesn’t mean that I am any better at it than before, but I know I enjoy reading scripture more these days, and that is particularly true of the psalter.
IV. Reading Psalms with Family at the Memorial Service
So when it came to leading the memorial service for my aunt JLS on May 25, 2024, I relied on the pattern of reading the psalms in a circumstance where the brokenness of human community was evident in many ways. The venue was a funeral home on the edge of Washington, DC My uncle and one of his daughters are members of Catholic parishes that are fairly conservative My cousin’s son, who is considering the priesthood, was rather distant perhaps because of adolescent awkwardness, but hen he also participates in a community of faith that believes that the mass should be conducted in Latin. This was but one of the tensions in a service that was to be led by a pair of United Methodist clergy. Most of the people who were present were from the LGBTQIA+ community that had been the primary support for my aunt. The video that we assembled showed JLS in many different contexts across the 78 years of her life, including her friends who dressed in flamboyant ways, one or two of which were drag queens.
My aunt had never been candid with her family about her sexual orientation. But during the last years of her life she lived in the home of the woman she identitfied as he life partner for 37 years. So we gathered as people who shared a person in common but we had not known one another before in the context of a clearly named pattern of relations. (For example, it occurred to me during the weekend we were all together in suburban Maryland that Joseph was my cousin.) JLS’s life story was not solely framed by her same-sex relationship with JH for 37 years (1981-2018), but it is not possible to speak truthfully about who she was and ignore that her relationship with JH was integral to who she understood herself to be. Similarly, JH’s son Joseph regarded JSL as a parent. When JH died, Joseph took JSL into his home where she lived for the remainder of her life.
My wife Mary, who is an ordained United Methodist clergywoman, led the congregation in saying the 23rd psalm and the prayer of committal. And as the person who for all practical purposes was responsible for exercising discerning selectivity, I commented on Psalm 63:1-8 in relation to the text from the Gospel of Matthew 11:28-30 and the vision of the New Jerusalem in Rev. 22. Given the focus of this post, I will go ahead and quote from the Psalm here.
63:1-8 NRSV A Psalm of David, when he was in the Wilderness of Judah.
1 O God, you are my God; I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
2 So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
beholding your power and glory.
3 Because your steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise you.
4 So I will bless you as long as I live;
I will lift up my hands and call on your name.5 My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast,
and my mouth praises you with joyful lips
6 when I think of you on my bed
and meditate on you in the watches of the night,
7 for you have been my help,
and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.
8 My soul clings to you;
your right hand upholds me.
This psalm, which is believed to have brought encouragement and consolation to David when he found himself in the wilderness has proven to be the glue that has made it possible for many people to make sense of things at difficult moments in life. Many of us have seen ourselves in it. Many people have learned to read their lives as children of God as they have performed it over and over again.
Oh yes, in my brief sermon, I also included the gloss by Athanasius of Alexandria and a choice phrase about the “Welcome Table” by James Baldwin the black writer whose searing reflections about the problems of race in American culture challenged our understanding of what community means. Had we all been part of a monastic community, the liturgy would have been more coherent, and Mary and I would have been able to share the responsibilities of serving as the scribes of the kingdom.
Despite the fact that the service was streamed in order to make it possible for relatives to participate virtually who were not able to travel, I think you could say that we had some “technology problems” Our attempts to bring folks together from a range of backgrounds and identities. But we had enough of the wherewithal to be able to proclaim the good news of the gospel in the face of death. And thank God for the pair of psalm texts that helped to knit everything together in the midst of the very loose set of relationship. I think the net result of my leadership on this occasion was to bridge the differences between groups of people who could easily have become estranged.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that performing the psalms made that possible. I dunno. Perhaps that is a stretch. What I can say is that I am grateful that as the person who was responsible for being “the scribe of the kingdom” (Matt. 13:52) on this occasion, I could trust that whatever treasures old and new that might select to bring forth from the storehouse of sacred and secular learning, the texts from the psalms would help us find our way in crossing over the divides.
Afterward we all gathered for a meal at a local Italian restaurant. I don’t think anyone mistook it for the Welcome Table. But we could anticipate the New Jerusalem and we had some sense that Jesus reaches out to us as people who are “weak and heavy laden” as we gathered as the not-yet reconciled members of an extended family connected by a person who we regarded as sister, aunt, and mother. Praying the Psalms is part of the way our lives become knit together in the midst of all that would fragment us. We Christians will continue to struggle to perform the scriptures well, but even when we do it badly, we are still reading. And as Chesterton reminded his own readers, that is the main thing. To keep reading. It is a hopeful practice.
Michael G. Cartwright, June 25, 2024
And now for the Footnotes at the End
(textual references appearn in the order of appearance in the post above
Athanasius of Alexandria, Letter to Marcellinus in the volume On the Incarnation (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press).
Cassiodorus, The Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning and On the Soul translated by James W. Halparn with an introduction by Mark Vessey (Liverpool University Press, 2004).
Derek Olson, The Honey of Souls: Cassiodorus and the Intepretation of the Psalms in the Early Medieval West (Liturgical Press, 2018) is a remarkable book that deserves ot be much better known.
Cassiodorus’s explanations of the Psalms have been re-translated in a pair of volumes in the Ancient Christian Writers Series published by Paulist Press. Vols. 51 & 52 (1991)
Photograph of Benedictine women at prayer available online: https://www.benedictine.com/meet-our-community
Nicholas Lash, “Performing the Scriptures” in Theology on the Way to Emmaus, 1986
Michael G. Cartwright, Practices, Politics, and Performance: Toward a Communal Hermeneutic for Christian Ethics (Princeton Theological Monographs series, 2006).
Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (2004)