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The Psalms in India1/24/2006 09:24:14I just got back from a trip to India that was basically one long theological challenge. It is incredible what getting back home can do, simply spatially, to relieve the urgency of those problems. In India, confronted with the temples and gurus and sadhus, they were intense. Here, they do not plague my well-being or my prayers, immediately taking on an academic irrelevance. Space is a powerful series of dimensions. I couldn't get away from Ps 137.4: "How shall we sing the LORD's song in a foreign land?" For a few days, among other things, I stayed at Shantivanum in Tamil Nadu state, a Benedictine Christian monastery pioneered by Dom Bede Griffiths and some French swamis to discover common ground between Christianity and Hinduism in the contemplative way of life. The thing is a fascinating experiment. The mass is merged with a HIndu temple puja, as reflected in the prayers and even the design of the temple/church. Meditation is the basic medium of experience. Christianity is stripped to its basics, bringing with it only the person of Christ and the Benedictine rule and otherwise transposing into Hindu culture. Certainly this is a bold and exciting idea: missionary Christianity without a doubt has always come too fraught with the glitz of European culture, both in theology and devotion, making it hardly inseperable from the colonial project. In theory, Shantivanum is a powerful solution. In practice, however, the ashram is in decline, drawing mainly disaffected Western retreatants and apparently not drawing much spiritual interest from the local Hindu communities. One local boy told me he was Hindu but liked Christians because they give him money. I gave him Rs. 200. Right. I will focus on one particular thing, though, which has its own peculiar interest: the Psalms of the Shantivanum liturgy. They use a book that has been published as Psalms for Christian Prayer by Griffiths. At Shantivanum, the book has no author but only a preface by him. What it is is an abridgment of the venerable Psalms, tidyied up with no dashing of children against stones. Griffiths argues in the preface that the Psalms as a whole, which have long been the foundation of the monastic liturgy, are not appropriate for Christian prayer. The violence and nationalism that they expound, which have their place in the Jewish source, are superceded by the Christian revelation, and for Christians to pray them is deeply misleading. Even the hermeneutics of commentators like Augustine, which seek to Christianize their meaning, do not sufficiently account for the effect of these vicious words. It is an interesting preface and I recommend it. This brave assertion of his should not be ignored. For my own part, I have long suspected that the Psalms are a little misused. When I first was learning about Christianity at a Trappist monastery, the Psalms scared me deeply, and sometimes they still do. I think that Griffiths is right in his insight; the Psalms are a fallen book. We should read them as we would the Law or Judges, as a historical event that tells us about God, and a text utterly transformed in meaning by Christ's love. It is holy yet suspended in the peculiar way that Paul explores with regard to the Law in his letters. I differ from Griffiths in suggesting that we divide the book up and decide what we agree with and what we don't; this is a precarious call to make, and seems to imply, not only that some parts of the psalms are holier than others, but also that we are in a position to pick which is which. Instead, with a nod to tradition, I suggest an alternative or an accessory to the Augustinian move, the blanket re-inerpretation. The psalms are a fallen text. They are beautiful expressions of the subjective, even naive experience of God in the world. Even in their poetics they are foreign and arcane, yet timelessly familiar. They are the voice of our fallen hearts, which ask for God to cause vengance before thinking of asking for only his love. Preserving their place in the liturgy, I see them, rather than as an accompaniment, as a counterpoint to the hymnal - the redeemed, ever-changing, fresh, sensual, and dynamic expression of the Christian vision. The hymnal at its best is the release from the Gregorian tenor of how Christians read the Psalms. This of course means more careful attention paid to the hymnal, which has been sadly ignored, especially since Vatican II, packed in many churches with sappy, mediocre, obvious melodies. It is our great opportunity to proclaim the world redeemed! If the hymnal were to express what is freshest and most boldly hopeful about the Christian revelation in our time, perhaps the good book of psalms would finally fall into place. I should say more about India and hopefully will soon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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