Life in the Psalms: Contemporary Meaning in Ancient Texts
Ebook
The Mowbray Lent Book for 2016.
The Psalms lie at the heart of Jewish and Christian worship. For thousands of years people in despair and praise have cried to God through the words of these ancient poems. Fragments of them are still widely known and loved, but such is the gulf between their ancient culture and our contemporary world that much of the depth of their meaning is lost to us.
Life in the Psalms aims to bridge that gulf, enabling the modern reader to find hope in these ancient texts by re-imagining their meanings for our times. The Psalms include texts that illuminate issues including climate change and environmental degradation; the illusions of consumerism and 'celebrity culture'; our response to migrants and asylum seekers; conditions of depression, anxiety, and grief, and the question of 'attention' in a digital age. Many texts take us deeply into the experience of meditation and contemplation; and teach us how to wonder, and find happiness.
Three introductory chapters are followed by reflections on thirty Psalms (one for each weekday of Lent), which aim to illuminate the text and help those in search of a more contemplative spirituality to discover, in the midst of the hard realities of a secular twenty-first century world, a deep consciousness of the healing mystery of God.
The Mowbray Lent Book for 2016.
Reinterprets the Psalms to address the spiritual, psychological and social realities of our own times
Enables the reader to re-imagine the psalms in a contemporary context, and pray them within a contemplative practice
Develops and deepens the practice of contemplative spirituality.
Introduction
1 Why the Psalms?
2 What are the Psalms?
3 Praying the Psalms
First Week: Pilgrimage
Psalm 122 The peace of Jerusalem
Psalm 84 Journeying towards integrity
Psalm 133 Oil running down
Psalm 42 Deep calls to deep
Psalm 43 What is true?
Second Week: Prayer
Psalm 63 Come and see
Psalm 123 Mercy within mercy within mercy
Psalm 131 Like a weaned child
Psalm 1 A tree planted by the waterside
Psalm 4 My heart, their corn and wine and oil
Third Week: Wonder
Psalm 8 Infants and stars
Psalm 104 Wonder and protest
Psalm 19 A theatre of glory
Psalm 139 The uttermost parts of the sea
Psalm 103 Forget not
Fourth Week: The Way
Psalm 119.1-8 The path of happiness
Psalm 119.9-16 Mind change
Psalm 119.129-36 Passion and compassion
Psalm 23 Lacking nothing
Psalm 27 In a secret place
Fifth Week: Hope
Psalm 71 Hoping continually
Psalm 46 Be still and know
Psalm 36 The well of life
Psalm 131 From where is my help to come?
Psalm 62 Tottering and leaning
Holy Week: Suffering
Psalm 91 Trampling the serpent
Psalm 13 How long, O Lord?
Psalm 137 By the waters of Babylon
Psalm 130 Out of the depths
Psalm 22 The image of the crucified
Notes
Acknowledgements
Woodhouse ... demonstrates over and over again, in a series of thoughtful daily reflections on selected Psalms, that the real object is alive and forceful and ultimately "relevant": the loving God of Israel.
- Title: Life in the Psalms: Contemporary Meaning in Ancient Texts
- Author: Patrick Woodhouse
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
- Print Publication Date: 2015
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781472923158, 9781472923141, 1472923146, 1472923154
- Resource ID: LLS:9781472923158
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-05-13T22:06:39Z
Patrick Woodhouse is a writer and Anglican priest. He was for thirteen years a Canon of Wells Cathedral. He has also been a parish priest, and a social responsibility adviser in two Anglican dioceses. He is the author of Etty Hillesum, a Life Transformed (Bloomsbury Continuum 2009). He lives in Somerset.