Psalms in the Night

God is within her. She will not fall.

As a youth in the summers, I would often spend a few weeks with my grandparents in Fort Worth, Texas. I loved it. My grandmother, Oneta, took long slow swims in the outdoor pool in their retirement community. We’d spend lazy hours in the water together and then more lazy hours watching cable—which we weren’t allowed to have at home—on the small television tucked into the white hutch bookshelf in her bedroom.

Between Nick at Nite shows like The Monkees, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Brady Bunch, I’d look through the spines on her shelves: medieval murder mysteries, Josephus, and some slightly racy novels about the Welsh monarchy from ages past.

But I was also given homework those summer weeks. In between lazy hours doing nothing, my father wanted me to memorize Psalms.

So I lay in my grandmother’s bed (my grandparents, married for sixty years, slept in separate rooms), her puffy comforter drawn across my legs, staring at her side table lamps that were shaped like Grecian statues and I would memorize Psalm 2:

“Why do the nations rage? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his anointed One.”

I was slightly annoyed at my assignment but I was good at remembering things so I did as I was asked. I didn’t know the phrase “spiritual practice” at the time but it definitely felt more like an intellectual exercise than something meant to bring me closer to God.

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A few nights ago, as I was feeling some anxiety, I reached for a Psalm in my mind, one that we’ve been memorizing together as a family. I could remember a phrase here and there but I couldn’t remember how it began. In the morning, I found my Bible, read these words from Psalm 46 and began weeping:

God is our refuge and strength,
    an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
    and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, 

though its waters roar and foam
    and the mountains quake with their surging.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
    the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
    God will help her at break of day.
Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
    he lifts his voice, the earth melts.

The Lord Almighty is with us;
    the God of Jacob is our fortress.

Come and see what the Lord has done,
    the desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease
    to the ends of the earth.
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
    he burns the shields[d] with fire.
He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
    I will be exalted among the nations,
    I will be exalted in the earth.”

The Lord Almighty is with us;
    the God of Jacob is our fortress.

I felt it in my nerves, my heart, my bones, this deep need for God to be a refuge. For God to be “within” me, to help me not fall, to send fresh streams to make me glad like that holy city from the Psalm.

Psalms are meant to be prayed and ruminated on. They’re meant to be called upon in our memory when we’re doing our daily mundane tasks or at night when we can’t sleep or when we just need words when we can’t find our own to pray.

In her book, Prayers in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren reminds us that the church has historically viewed the Psalms as “medicinal.”

They teach us how to be fully human and fully alive…Athanasius wrote that “whatever your particular need or trouble from [the Psalms] you can select a form of words to fit it, so that you learn the way to remedy your ill.”

Those intellectual exercises my father gave me seemed flat or bland at the time. But they equipped me for my time of need, and many years later, I still call upon them.

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My father died five and a half years ago, and I didn’t know until after he died that he also suffered from anxiety. In his youth and adulthood, even after he was married, he would often throw up when he was nervous. Like many in his generation who weren’t allowed to process their grief or be weak, there was a lot my father held in, much to the detriment of his health and, in turn, ours.

I think about that sometimes, and especially now as my counselor tells me to allow myself to grieve. I wonder if he used those Psalms the same way I do late at night. I wonder if they were his solace as he suffered in silence. I hope he found some medicinal relief in those ancient words.

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May you find your medicine in the Psalms today.