(Originally published in the Catholic Times, May 13, 2012 © 2012 Mary van Balen)
“How do you manage Liturgy of the Hours?” I asked a friend who is an oblate of a Benedictine abbey.
“I don’t get to it everyday. I do it when I can. Often, I just read through the Psalter.”
That conversation came to mind when I was discouraged by my inability to fit more of the Hours into my daily life. So, I pulled a Psalter from shelves in my study. A gift from a Trappist friend, the old book had been rebound in the monastery with a plain burnt sienna fabric and blue end papers. Father Maurice’s name is written across the top with pencil in his beautiful calligraphic scrip along with a small cross and the year: 1965.
The Grail translation, new at the time, like the translation of psalms found in the Jerusalem Bible, is made from the Hebrew. As I held the book and read from the yellowed pages, I imagined Fr. Maurice sitting in the chapel at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky, chanting these ancient hymns day after day, year after year. I thought, too of my friends at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, and the time I spent with them praying the psalms throughout the day.
Sometimes, reading the more violent ones, I have wondered why they remain in liturgical collections. I have heard others voice that concern and remember a story shared by a monk at St. John’s. At one time, they were considering the collection of psalms used in their prayer. Someone suggested removing the more violent ones. Why pray war songs, songs that include dashing children against the rocks or slaughtering one’s enemies?
A monk of great stature in the community objected. Violence is part of Old Testament history. Indeed they are part of our history. “Remove those,” he said, “ and the Psalter just collapses.”
Our world today is not so different from the ancient Hebrew one. Using drones to kill our enemies makes their deaths and those civilians who lose their lives, euphemistically called “collateral damage,” invisible but no less gruesome. Read More