1. Why I love the Psalms

       It was around 1966.

       I was in graduate school at Harvard, thrown there by my religious superiors and told to study sociology so that I could teach at Quincy College.

       Time magazine had just featured a cover story on the “death of God.” My mind was swirling with ideas from sociologists like Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Both of these men thought that religion was important for how people behave, but their own personal beliefs were closer to agnosticism than to faith. We friars had quit praying the Latin breviary in common as too unintelligible and routinized.

       I was experiencing the beauty of romantic love for the first time. I recall telling one close woman friend, “I don’t even know if there is a God, but I know he doesn’t want me to marry.”

       In the midst of that swirling stream of ideas and emotions, I reached out for a lifeline and grabbed the psalms. I told myself: “People have used these words for thousands of years. Maybe I can hang on to some of the words for dear life and survive.”

       In the background was my memory of a Benedictine who had preached a retreat to us during our seminary days. He told us “Love the psalms.” Those words stuck in my brain.

       Spiritual writers recommend prayer techniques like the “centering prayer.” As I understand the term, it means trying to banish all thoughts from your mind. I can’t handle that. My mind seems to be always at work. I need words. Otherwise I fall asleep. But I take my time reading the words and reflecting on them. “Getting through them for the sake of getting through them” is a waste of time.

       Many people in my life, mostly uneducated, used to use prayer books. Maybe they were on to something. I recall an older woman who arrived at 5:00 in the morning at St. Peter’s Church in Chicago. She was distressed. Someone had robbed her on her way to church. She wasn’t mourning her loss of money. The thief had taken her prayer book.

 

       In the 1990s, Carroll Stuhlmiller made using psalms more intelligible with a commentary he wrote for the Psalter published by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL). :

 
Opening the Book of Psalms is like walking into a home, lived in for many generations. Photos and mementos, some ancient and some new, blend together. Some are well preserved, others were dropped and cracked by the children, still others have faded, and a few are even difficult to identify. Only the grandparents know the story of each precious remembrance--if only they were still with us.

       I had thought that my problem understanding some of the psalms was due to my poor Latin. I realized that nobody knows what some of the verses mean.

       Some authors produce writings that are like ore pulled up from a mine. You grind through a lot of rock and every once in a while you hit a nugget of gold that makes the grinding worthwhile. There’s some of that in the psalms--there are unintelligible passages next to verses of sublime beauty and meaning. The ICEL psalter, which was designed as a help to prayer, often makes meaningful sentences out of passages that make little sense in Latin or Greek. Other translations, such as those in the New American Bible (the official Catholic version today) and the King James version just plow ahead without trying to help.

      Over the years the psalms have become more and more central to the way I approach God. In the 80s and 90s we prayed morning or evening psalms in common. Then I made the decision to pray on my own the psalms in the other liturgical “hours”: midday prayer, the office of readings, and night prayer.

       The ICEL psalter, published in the 1990s, really excited me. I began to use it for private prayer. I typed up the antiphons for the liturgical seasons and kept them next to the ICEL book.

       Antiphons are the way that the church ties the psalms to the liturgical year, with its seasons of Ordinary Time, Advent, Lent, and Easter. I have always loved the church year. It calls me over and over to live the story of Jesus in my own life.

       To make a long story short, over time I added the antiphons and then the Latin, Greek, and English Grail psalms to the ICEL version. Electronic media make reading such a compilation possible. Forty years ago I tried to photocopy some Greek and paste it next to the English. I didn’t get very far before I abandoned the project--the result would have been as big as a photo album.

       Tradition in our Franciscan friaries didn’t pay much attention to the proper hours of the day. As novices we prayed Vespers and Compline (evening and night prayer) at 2:00 in the afternoon. Lauds is supposed to be morning prayer, but we prayed Matins and Lauds for the following day at 5:00 pm the day before. We prayed Prime, Tierce, Sext and None (daytime prayers) before and after the 6:00 am Mass.

       I have to pray the psalms in the morning. Spreading them throughout the day as the liturgy suggests does not work for me. I like to pray them at one sitting.

       There are three psalms that the liturgists assign for the office of readings only in Advent, Lent, and Easter: psalms 78, 105, and 106. I use them every four weeks; they replace psalms that are duplicated elsewhere during the four week cycle. Three psalms: 58, 83, and 109, are so vengeful that the liturgists do not include them at all. I have included them in this psalter by replacing duplicate psalms, though I don’t sing them.

       The result is a plan that includes all 150 psalms beginning to end, with all the centuries of wear and tear that have handed them down to us through Greek, and Latin, and now English translations. I hope they can help you to know the Lord as much as they have helped me.
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2. WHAT IS IN THIS SITE?

       This site will contain the twenty-eight days of the Catholic “Liturgy of the Hours,” with everything removed except the psalms and antiphons for the church year. Each verse of each psalm contains four versions of the verse: the Greek (Septuagint) version; the Latin version from the pre-Vatican II breviary; a 1966 English translation of the verse by the Grail organization; and the version created by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy in the decades leading up to the 1990s. I have made minor editorial changes in the ICEL version.

       A gracious helper uploaded all twenty-eight days onto this site, but Wix software does not preserve all the features in my original. Cleaning up the site is taking some time.

 

       To use the site you need a smartphone or tablet.
 

Why a Latin and Greek psalter?

       There are few people around who can read Latin or Greek, but both languages are important in Jewish and Christian history, and in this age of widespread education and online resources, we should encourage believers to aim high.

       Praying the psalms in Latin reminds us of centuries of religious men and women and priests using those exact words up until the 1960s. Praying in Greek reminds us that early Christians, and possibly Jesus himself, would have used those exact words, which had been created 200 years before Jesus’s birth by a panel of scholars in Alexandria, Egypt.

       Praying psalms in Greek or Latin highlights some features of the psalms that English translations do not provide. For example, numerous psalms pair the two Greek words ἔλεος (eleos--mercy or steadfast love) and ἀλήθεια (alethia--truth or faithfulness), as characteristics of God. The same pairing occurs in Latin, with misericordia and veritas.

       For example, here is the second verse of the shortest psalm, psalm 117: “Quoniam confirmata est super nos misericordia ejus, et veritas Domini manet in æternum.” Grail translation: “Strong is his love for us;
he is faithful for ever."

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Sources of the texts

       The Greek, Latin, and Grail psalms are available on the internet.

       The Grail is an English organization that had produced a translation of the psalms back in the 1960s. The Grail people have recently published a new translation, which online versions of the breviary now use. I have kept the older one because thirty years of using the 1976 still-in-print official four-volume Liturgy of the Hours have lodged the words from that version in my memory.

       The ICEL psalter is the product of decades of work by an ecumenical group of scriptural, musical, and anthropological scholars. It was approved for liturgical use by the U.S. bishops in the early 1990s, but then a committee in Rome de-certified it and the bishops ordered it taken off the market. The ICEL version is still not available for purchase, which is why I see no ethical problem with placing my re-typed version in a blog. I have modified it in several places. For example, I revived the reference to Melchizedek in Psalm 110 because that seemed to be too important to leave out of a translation.

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3. The structure of the Liturgy of the Hours

       The Liturgy spreads the psalms over four weeks. The earlier version that we used before Vatican II had us praying all 150 every week, along with scripture passages, readings from church fathers, lives of saints (often of dubious historical accuracy), and responsories. The 1976 English Liturgy of the Hours includes scripture and other inspirational authors—it is the readings that make the final product fill up four volumes—the shortest, for Advent and Christmas, has 1700 pages. There are one-volume versions that succeed in collapsing the text and restricting the reading selections.

       Sunday of the first week is how the psalter begins.

       Each day’s prayer starts with the “Invitatory,” a psalm (psalm 95--some alternatives are suggested in the official version) with an appropriate antiphon interspersed between the psalm verses. Then follow morning prayer (one psalm, a canticle from the Old Testament, and another psalm, followed by Zachary's canticle), midday prayer (three psalms or psalm sections), office of readings (three psalms or sections), evening prayer (two psalm or sections followed by a canticle from the New Testament and then Mary's canticle), and night prayer (one or two psalms followed by Simeon's canticle).

       Before each psalm I have sometimes included notes from the commentary on that psalm from the New Jerome Biblical Commentary (1990), abbreviated “NJBC.” The 1968 Grail Psalter edition has wonderful introductions. I have included all of them.

       Tradition ends each psalm with the “Glory be.” I alternate an inclusive language version of the Glory Be with the traditional one. The alternate version is gender inclusive, It addresses God directly, a feature that startled me into rethinking what it means to address the Lord in person.

       After years of praying with only the ICEL version, I found that returning to the gendered Grail language made me appreciate again how I experienced God during the twenty or thirty years that we used that language in both private and community prayer. I try to appreciate how gendered language can alienate some people, but also how that traditional language has nourished both men and women over the centuries. St. Paul said that if his eating pork would cause a fellow Christian to turn away from the Lord, he would never again eat pork. If gender-inclusive language helps people to pray who find it hard to pray in the traditional language, I will use gender-inclusive language.

       The official “Liturgy of the Hours” (often called the “breviary”), contains other features such as short responsories and readings from scripture or sacred authors. This psalter does not include any of those elements--it is strictly psalms and antiphons.
 

The church year

       The church year, with its seasons of Advent, Lent, Easter, and ordinary time, has been used for centuries by the church to sanctify the passage of time and give structure to the Christian goal of living into the story of Jesus. In the psalter the church does this with “antiphons,” phrases placed before and after a psalm that remind one of what season it is when the person is praying the psalm.

Night Prayer Hymns

       After night prayer each day, tradition has added four hymns to Mary.

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       The first one, “Salve Regina,” translated into the English prayer that begins “Hail, Holy Queen,” is used for ordinary time from Pentecost till Advent.

       The second one, “Alma, Redemptoris Mater,” is for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany.

       The third one, “Ave Regina,” is used from the feast of the Baptism to Holy Saturday.

 
       The fourth one, “Regina Coeli,” is for the Easter season, which ends with Pentecost.
 

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4. SINGING THE HOURS

       I was inspired to sing the psalms by observing the Muslim practice of bowing five times a day in prayer. Since my body will not allow me to use that gesture, I decided that the physical practice of singing could be a substitute.

 

       Psalms are meant to be sung. In the first years of my life as a friar, we chanted the Latin verses. One of us would hold down the key of “F” on an organ as we chanted.

       Scholars categorize the psalms in many different ways. The ICEL editors use nine categories:

1. hymns;
2. songs of Zion;
3. individual laments
4. individual thanksgivings;
5. communal laments;
6. communal thanksgivings;
7. royal psalms;
8. wisdom/historical psalms;
9. prophetic psalms.

 

       The editors provided melodies for each of the nine kinds of psalms.

The ICEL melodies

       Each verse of a psalm can be divided into two, three, or four segments. Each melody provided by the ICEL editors can have four segments.

       When a verse has four segments, all four melodies are used.

       When the verse has three segments, you use melodies one, two, and four.

       When there are just two segments, use melodies one and four.

       The first part of each segment can have any number of syllables; the last three syllables in each segment have one note each:

       In order to make it easier for a cantor to sight-read the melodies, I transcribed them so that they all start on “G.” When you do not use instrumental accompaniment, the starting note is whatever note is comfortable to sing.

Tone 1, hymns:
G F# G A | B A G A |
G F# E D | E G A G

Tone 2, songs of Zion:
G A B A | A B C B |
B C D C | C [high F] E D

Tone 3, individual lament:
G F# D E | A G E F# |
B A F# G | F# E D E

Tone 4, individual thanksgiving:
G E G A | A G F G |
C A C D | A G A C

Tone 5, community lament:
G Ef F G | G Af G F |
F D Ef F | F Ef F G

Tone 6, community thanksgiving:
G F Ef G | G Bf D C |
C D Ef Bf | Af G Af Bf

Tone 7, royal psalms:
G A B C | A B C D |
E D C A | D C B C

Tone 8, wisdom psalms:
G F# D E | E F# G D |
D E G A | A G E G

Tone 9, prophetic psalms:
G E F# G | B A G A |
C B A B | A G F# G

       In addition to the nine psalm categories, there are three more melodies included in the psalter. They are for the Invitatory psalm, and the canticles of Zachary, Mary, and Simeon.

Invitatory melody:
G A B G | G A F# E |
E F# G E | E G F# D

Canticles of Zachary and Mary:
G B A G | E F# G A |
A B G A | A G A B

Canticle of Simeon:
G F# G A | A G F# E (this night prayer canticle has only two sections)

Example

       The following verse, the opening verse of psalm 33, the third psalm in morning prayer on Tuesday of week one, looks like this:.

              33 3.1/10 Shout joy to the Lord, - 4
              lovers of justice, /
              how right to praise! /
              Praise God on the harp, /
              with ten-string lyre
              sing to the Lord. ◦

       The verse is from psalm 33, which is the third psalm in morning prayer for that day. This verse is the first of ten verses in the psalm. This verse has four segments. 

       The accent in each line of a verse is two syllables before the last accent in the line. For example, in the line:

               33 2.1/10 Shout joy to the Lord, - 4
                lovers of justice, /

The line's last accent is the word JUStice, so the second syllable before that is the word loVERS.

The line would read:

              33 2.1/10 Shout joy to the Lord - 4
               lovERS of justice, /

 

The rest of the verse is accented this way:

              how RIGHT to praise!/
              Praise God ON the harp, /
              with ten-string lyre
              sing TO the Lord. ◦

The verse with the four melodies added:

         G    G   G  G     G
(1) Shout joy to the Lord - 4

G  F#   D   E  E
lovERS of justice. /

       A       G      E    F#
(2) how RIGHT to praise! /

         B       B     A    F#   G
(3) Praise God ON the harp, /

        F# F#     F#      F#
(4) with ten-string lyre.

  F#   E    D     E
sing TO the Lord. ◦

       Notice that the first and fourth segments are printed on more than one line. I use a single slash ( / ) to show when each line ends. The final line ends with a tiny circle ( ◦ )

       Occasionally editors will package more than one 4-line segment in a single verse. When that happens, I separate the segments by a double slash ( // ).

 

Friary experience

 

       The friars in my Holy Cross community here in Quincy, Illinois have been singing the ICEL psalms in our community prayer for ten years. We began slowly with one tone, and gradually added more.

       In my experience, we were never able to pray psalms in common without going faster and faster. Instead of dividing the community into two equal-sized alternating choirs, which is the traditional way of praying psalms in common, we alternate between a leader or cantor and everybody else. The cantor controls the speed.

       We have learned that allowing a brief pause before each verse makes the experience more prayerful.
 

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