Sep 11 2019 Psalm 119: 49-72

Your statutes have been like songs to me wherever I have lived as a stranger.

The summer after college graduation, I worked in Germany at a youth hostel/outward bound camp. It was a fantastic summer, and when I went, I wasn’t sure whether I was going to get a job there, or return to whatever was next. But there were times during the summer, when I felt acutely homesick, but not as I recall like kids do at aborted sleepovers. I wasn’t crying for my parents, or friends. But I had a deep sense that the place I found myself was not home. The language, food, and customs were all different.

I’d brought music with me, including a Dan Fogelberg song, Illinois. “I need a breath of that sweet country air”. And while that sweet country air was not something that suburban Chicago offered, my college days in rural Illinois definitely did. I’d play that song, again and again and could be momentarily transported back to places and ways that were more familiar, more innate.

I can imagine that’s what the Psalms felt like to people in exile, thousands of years ago, and even now. To be in a foreign land, either because we’re forced, or by choice, is unsettling. The poetic lyrics of the psalms can be as familiar and grounding as the lyrics of a song in Germany in the 1980’s.

That’s what I think it means when the psalmist writes about the statutes being song. The familiarity of the place and time when they were first heard can bring comfort to strangers in a strange land.

Some monasteries have a discipline where they recite their way through the 150 psalms in one week, every week, week after week. I can imagine that ingrains the psalms in your soul, so that when they’re heard again, the psalms serve as that immediate rooting. I have a small sense of that, from a time when I had the luxury of participating in noonday prayer, nearly 5 days a week when my office was very near my church. It’s a very brief prayer service, less than 10 minutes, and the psalms that are read don’t vary much. So week after week, we read the same snippets of prayers. To this day, when those psalms come up in other contexts, I’m transported to those sweet times of prayer and the others with whom I shared that time.  

This morning I’m thinking about how familiarity of these sacred texts creates that immediate recentering. I’m really enjoying the luxury of this morning time to work my way through Scripture appointed for Morning Prayer, and I’m wondering if there’s room in my world to look at adding Evening Prayer. Not so much for the writing, but for the continued steeping and centering in Scripture, which like the exiles, are becoming like songs to me.