THE psalms are the “voice of the Church”. They teach us how to speak to God, and how God might speak to us. They are the words of a creature kneeling before their Creator, articulating something of the longing soul, the poetry of the heart in all its fullness; they express every human emotion, the beautiful and the ugly.
Who cannot be enamoured of the yearning captured in Psalm 42 — “As the deer longs for the water brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God” — and equally horrified by the imagery of Psalm 38: “My wounds stink and fester because of my foolishness. I am utterly bowed down and brought very low; I go about mourning all the day long.”
The psalms journey with us from birth to death, and are alongside us as we navigate every twist and turn of our existence. Their words are said, and most powerfully sung, until they are engraved on the psyche, and, once there, they become a means of expressing emotions when other words fail.
I have used the psalms at the bedside of the dying, reciting Psalm 23 or Psalm 121. I have turned to the psalms as a coffin is lowered into the ground, as only the words of Psalm 139 seem to fit: “If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.”
The words of the psalms come to mind when watching the news. I am particularly cognisant in the current climate of those whose speeches are “softer than butter, though war is in their heart” (Psalm 55); and, on seeing the oppression of the most vulnerable in our world, I am reminded: “For the needy shall not always be forgotten and the hope of the poor shall not perish for ever” (Psalm 9).
We humans have walked these long roads before, and, over 3000 years ago, sages and wordsmiths observed these happenings and gleaned these emotions and translated them into timeless and powerful poetry.
The theology of this book of the Bible cannot easily be defined, but there is theology here. This is theology facing where theology should face, towards God alone. In Theology in the Parishes (Comment, 8 August 2025), Sarah Coakley noted that the spiritual seeker of today has a longing and a thirst for God: God, who is the Church’s most precious and most worthy missional tool, and the most interesting thing about the Church.
The psalms provide the foundation for the kind of theology which is God-orientated, and they feed the religious imagination as well as the heart. Every Christian community would do well to drink deeply from the wisdom of the psalms, praying them together and meditating upon their meaning.
The psalms teach the Christian how to pray for real, without obfuscation or gloss. There is doubt, as there is certainty; there is joy, as there is the deepest and most gut-wrenching suffering and sorrow. There is lament, rage, anger, betrayal, and desolation. We might ask: can Christians possibly think these things? In pastoral encounters, I have often used the psalms for reference: if the psalmist can be this angry, so can we. God can take it.
THE psalms remind us that a person of faith can exhibit a spectrum of emotions that are not always “nice”. The psalms can be so shocking that, in some refined places, their words of hatred and vengeance are “edited out” so as not to offend the public, while at the same the texts take us to moments of ecstatic jubilation.
This range of expression may be partly why the psalms are feared or ignored by those who want definite answers or clear-cut literal approaches to the spiritual or theological life. The psalms will not afford us that easy possibility — they make us work much harder.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the book of Psalms “the prayer book of the Bible”, and said: “Whenever the psalter is abandoned, an incomparable treasure is lost to the Christian Church. With its recovery will come unexpected power.” The psalms are like a burning flame that cannot easily be controlled; they are like an uncatchable bird that cannot be tamed; they are the engine room of prayer in the life of the Church. Without the words of these ancient prayers, the Church will edge dangerously towards relying on its own words rather than those given to us, and our life before God will be the poorer for it.
St Athanasius, in his letter to Marcellinus, describes the treasures of the psalter: “Let whoever reads this Book of Psalms take the things in it quite simply as God-inspired; and let each select from it, as from the fruits of a garden, those things of which he sees himself in need. For I think that in the words of this book all human life is covered . . . in every case the words you want are written down for you, and you can say them as your own.”
Christians and theologians throughout history have taken the psalms seriously and made these words their own. Augustine gave an expository sermon on each of the 150 psalms: each is held up to the light, dappling the world with colour. John Henry Newman suggested that we could read the psalms only in relation to Christ; for us that is where they have their meaning.
Evelyn Underhill, in Worship, offered that the psalms can be a source of unity for the Church: “In them we have an inexhaustible storehouse of devotional material and a means of common prayer and adoration which is accepted as it stands by Christians of every type.”
Thomas Merton, in Bread in the Wilderness, describes the psalter as the most “significant and influential collection of religious poems ever written”, but he is also clear that they are more than poetry, more than literature: “They are bread, miraculously provided by Christ, to feed those who have followed him into the wilderness”.
CHRIST knew these words, and they were inscribed on his heart, too. At his most vulnerable, nailed to the cross, with his very last breath he reaches for the words of Psalm 22.
The psalms ripple through the scriptures: they were noted as being sung by the earliest church communities, part of the sacrifice of praise which gave those early Christians their distinctive identity. The grand finale of the psalter, Psalm 150, is a psalm for the end of all things, which somehow echoes the vision of the last book of the Bible “Let everything that has breath, praise the Lord.”
The biblical scholar N. T. Wright, in The Case for the Psalms: Why they are essential, notes that St Paul describes Christians as “God’s poem”, and God gives us the poetry of psalms so that, through our praying and singing of them, we become living, breathing, praying, singing poems. Whether through corporate worship or private prayer, the book of Psalms is one of the places where an embodied Christian poetic and the Christian imagination can flower.
St Benedict, in his Rule, dictates when and how the psalms are to be said, their complete recitation each week seen as a vital and visible “work” of the Christian community. Religious Brothers and Sisters have always used the psalms to shape their time, weaving the psalmody through the daily offices and finding psalms that speak to the soul hour by hour, and season by season. Thomas Merton describes the psalms as permeating every part of his life: said in the middle of the night, there on the lips at mass, interrupting work in the fields, recited and sung in the offices, the last words spoken before sleep.
Throughout history, many have treasured the psalter as a vessel for their hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows. These little books were illuminated or inscribed with personal memories, carried in a pocket — even Henry VIII possessed such a psalter for his private devotions.
The best gift we can offer the new Christian, the seeker, or the pilgrim today, is the Book of Psalms, expressing the prayers of millions who have gone before us, teaching us how to speak to God in our present reality, reminding us that God can take our doubts, our questioning, our suffering, and our desolation, and reorientate us for joy and praise. The psalter is bread for the journey.
If your church does not say or sing the psalms regularly, perhaps you might ask, why not? N. T. Wright says again: “to worship without using the psalms is to risk planting seeds that will never take root.”
If you haven’t yet been able to feast on this spiritual food, there is no time like the present. This is the day that the Lord has made: we will rejoice and be glad in it (Psalm 118). The psalms will reward you, they will change your life for ever, and, by making these words your own, you will become closer to the God who fearfully and wonderfully made you.
Canon Victoria Johnson is Dean of Chapel of St John’s College, Cambridge, and author of On Voice: Speech, song, silence, human and divine (DLT, 2024). She will be speaking at “Finding inspiration in the Psalms”, a Church Times festival on 2 October, in York. Tickets and more information here.
