Getting ready for Lent!

 Lent is almost upon us, and so it is time to work out what penances you will be undertaking.

St Benedict, you will recall, set up a spiritual regime based on three main planks:

• fasting (chapter 41 of the Rule);
• spiritual reading (chapter 48); and
• extra prayers and austerity (chapter 49).

Can I suggest as part of this, that you consider engaging more deeply with the psalms as part of your Lenten practice?

The psalms as a key to the spiritual life

The book of Psalms is the Church's prayerbook, and the psalms have always played a key role in the spiritual life of the Church, in part because its contents cover prayers for virtually every occasion; in part because they teach a rich set of doctrines, constituting in effect a summary of all the rest of Scripture; and in part because they contain prophesies, both of what was to come in the New Testament, and of what is still to come.

For this reason, they are traditionally the very core of most forms of monastic life.    

Monks were traditionally expected to learn the psalter by heart, a process that often took several years.  

They then continued to engage with the psalms in several ways, such as:

• chanting selected psalms at each of the several 'hours' of the Office each day;
• use of individual verses associated with particular rituals, for example in blessings for meals;
• meditative recitation of some or all of the psalms (the psalter in order, or the Gradual or Penitential psalms for example); and
• lectio divina on the psalms.

Laypeople, of course, will not generally have the time or desire to do all that monks do. Still, engaging in some of these practices at least a little can, I think, be spiritually rewarding for everyone.

So if you don't say the Office at all or regularly, let me encourage you to up your game this Lent, and consider saying some of the psalms each day through Lent, committing to study them, or saying more of the Office than you usually would.

Some options to consider

If you already say some of the Office, perhaps you could say an additional hour?

Or perhaps commit to saying some or all of Psalm 118, the longest, but in my view, also the most beautiful of the Psalms; or perhaps the Penitential or Gradual Psalms?

An alternative is to consider is studying some of the psalms in more detail.  

If you usually say the Office in English, for example, you could decide to learn to say it in Latin for example, or read a good commentary on them such as that of St Augustine.

For those interested in getting a crib for the Latin as well as digging into the meaning of the psalms in more depth, I've previously done several Lenten series, looking at Psalms 118, the Gradual psalms, the Penitential Psalms, and the psalms of Tenebrae.  

This year I plan to resume my series of verse by verse notes on the psalms over at Psallam Domino Blog, looking at Psalms 139 and 140 (Thursday Vespers), so please do consider taking a look at that too.