Finding Rest by Singing the Psalter
Rest, Inc.: It’s So Hot Right Now!
Contemporary society is increasingly marked by a pervasive sense of burnout. We are more developed, advanced, healthy, and connected than ever, yet we are weary. The yoke of modernity appears hard, and its burden is heavy. In this exhaustion lies a hunger for the rest of the Living God. The words of Psalm 63 capture the overwhelming experience of the spiritually hungry today:
My soul thirsts for you; my flesh longs for you / as in a dry and weary land without water.
Psalm 63:1
While this has always been true of humanity, something about modernity feels particularly dry, weary, and waterless. Voices decrying the exhaustive culture of achievement-oriented narcissism that has come to animate modern life are increasing in number and volume. “Rest,” our world commands us. “Leave the rat race,” it tells us. Our marketplace is overflowing with retreats, e-courses, books, talks, and countless “online resources” to prevent burnout, cultivate spiritual vitality, and lead us to rest.
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Yet, despite how accurate these cultural prophets may be about our civilizational fatigue and despite what may help in some of the prescriptions for cultivating rest, much of the popular discourse on rest seems fixed and subjugated. Rest often becomes viewed as a kind of labor, and the self (or others’ selves) becomes a 24/7 construction site. As thirsty as we may be (a la Psalm 63), we appear, following George Ritzer’s assessment of consumer culture, “to be dying of thirst even though we are surrounded by water.” The feedback loop formed between self-improvement and burnout slowly closes until it reveals its true nature.
Exhausted By Pursuing Rest
As tender as my years in ministry are, I can quickly recall a long list of individuals whom I have pastored through fatigue. They often begin their journey with something like, “I’ve done all the right things: I’ve cut back my working hours, got a job I liked, increased my financial margins, read [insert whatever recent book on rest], gotten therapy… etc. ad inf… I really have put the effort into working on myself, and I am still just so tired…” often adding something like, “…and always angry.” From this field sown in frustrated labor to better oneself and achieve rest emerges the question: How do we heed the call to turn inward, practice self-reflection, and examine ourselves in a way that does not acerbate the general problem today of hypertrophied self-focus?
Lent: A Time for Restfulness
The Season of Lent, a time of reflection and self-examination, calls us to the contemplation and restfulness we have been discussing. It will grow louder and more salient as we journey with the Liturgical Calendar into this season of contrition and repentance. Where is the path that leads the weary self out of exhaustion rather than deeper into it? Where can those who thirst for God’s rest go to find him (cf. Psalm 41:2)? In a culture like ours, self-examination cannot simply mean narcissists spending more time caring for themselves.
Though we could discuss many answers, I want to dedicate the rest of this article to one particular practice: singing the Psalter. Uniquely, the Psalms bring a person into an encounter with the living Christ, who is himself the Lord of the Sabbath and the true rest of his people. When we sing these songs—his songs and our songs—alongside him in the Spirit, whether alone or in community, we become like Isaac, re-digging wells of life (cf. Genesis 26:18). In the Psalter, water flows, and God causes the arid and parched places of our lives to burst open with streams like the wadis of the Negev in high flood (Psalm 78:16).
On Singing the Psalter
We must remember that the Psalms are, first and foremost, songs initially written to music, sung to music by God’s people for millennia, and sung—not merely quoted—by Christ. They continue to be sung as more and more musical settings have been composed. While non-musical reading or reflection on the Psalter is an excellent and commendable practice, it is not quite the same as singing them.
One can imagine the horror we might feel if someone told us they never listened to our favorite musician but chose rather only to read their lyrics. Likewise, it is hard to make one’s way through a filled with phrases like “I will sing and make melody with all my soul” (Psalm 108:1) and not feel that these songs beckon us to sing them.
All our digital technology that renders private listening “as good as or better than” in-person singing. However, we often find ourselves tempted to believe music’s goal is simply to be heard. There’s a certain museal impulse toward music today, as if music only succeeds when perfectly recorded and laid down to rest on golden vinyl. But that is misleading—only a half-truth. Music’s goal is not just to be heard but also to be made.
Knowing from the Making
Music is, moreover, most deeply known from within the making of it. One only comes to know a song deeply when one can sing it. So it is with the Psalter. To know them in the deepest sense means to sing them in the Spirit of Christ. We achieve deep rest and satisfaction when the praises of the Lord are on our lips (Psalm 63:5). We become like those filled with the finest meat and wine. When we sing the Psalms to God, we give back to him a tithe of the breath he breathed into us at creation (Genesis 2:7).
Some may protest that they are not musical or lack good voices. While I’ll leave most of that protest for another time, I will only say that some things are worth doing, even if it means doing them imperfectly while one matures. Along with repentance, church attendance, tithing, almsgiving, caring for the needy, welcoming the outcast, showing hospitality to the saints, and confessing our sins to one another, the only start we can make is a poor one. As the old hymn goes, “If you tarry ‘till you’re ready, you will never come at all.”
The Spirituality of Singing
Moreover, there is a deeply embodied spirituality in singing the Psalter. Reading the Psalms as mere lyrics is almost strictly an intellectual practice. Krang—the supervillain from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a brain with eyes who lives in a jar—could read the Psalms. Singing engages our voice, breath, mouths, ears, and our internal sense of balance, proportion, and rhythm, which relate much more to the systems of the inner ear than to the eye). It draws on our ability not only to lift words from a page but to think ahead of our reading along musical trajectories, pairing those words with notes in a pattern.
In this way, the musical quality of the Psalms draws us into time rather than away from it. I must linger on where the score has been and modulate my voice from the previous note and lyric to the current note while also rushing onward into the future of the music. Reading silently moves faster than time while singing reminds us that the future is “something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is,” thus subverting the hurried coercion of 24/7 sabbath-less-ness. The act of singing the Psalms contributes to the labor of entering his rest (Hebrews 4:11).
Numerous psalters pointed for chanting exist. Most of these come with very good introductory directions and explanations, even for those who do not read music or who have no experience singing or chanting the Psalter. The Seedbed Psalter even offers settings of the Psalms that pair with popular hymn melodies. Begin where you are able. The point, however, is to begin.
The Psalter and Rest that Unites
When I sing the Psalms, I never sing alone, for they are Christ’s words, summed up in his dying and rising Life. They are the eternal songs of the victorious Son. When I sing them, I do so in the Spirit of the risen Lord. We often discuss “union with Christ” in abstract terms, but the Psalter brings all that discussion into embodied reality.
We might envision a duet sung by two lovers, unified in their lives and music. Indeed, the shared music itself becomes a tabernacle of mutual communion between the two singers. My singing of the Psalter occurs within the reality of the Totus Christus. I sing in the Spirit as a member of the fellowship that embodies the fullness of him who is the Head. As Augustine teaches us, when we sing the Psalms,
He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our head, he is prayed to by us as our God.
Augustine En Narrationes in Psalmos, 85.1; as quoted in Williams On Augustine, (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016),28.
The Body of Christ, The Body of the Church
Christ sings his songs, for that is what the Psalter is, in the body of his Church. Yet, the Church also sings her songs, for that too is what the Psalter is, in the voice of her Lord. Furthermore, I engage in this act as my present self, joining with both the past and future images of myself who have sung and will sing these songs. These songs, in turn, once graced the lips of saints from previous ages and will grace the lips of all the redeemed in the ages to come. Christian personhood embodies psalmic personhood; our life makes more sense when psalmed with God and before him in the body of his Son—the body of the Church.
This rest fundamentally differs from what popular culture offers. If, according to the Augustinian dictum, we are restless until we find our rest in God, then the Psalms embody that “finding of rest” in the very act of worship, adoration, lament, and supplication.
I pour my sorrows into the words of, for example, Psalm 88. These are Christ’s words—his words of sorrow—augmented by the sorrows of generations of God’s people. This is a kind of unitive rest in the eternity of God, who holds all my times in his hands (Psalm 31:15).
Waves and Breakers
In singing the Psalter, my life becomes like the cataracts and breakers of Psalm 42:7. My depths are called forth into the eternal depths of Christ. His eternal songs become my transitory songs; my fleeting moments do not disappear into nothingness but transition into the expanse of his eternal sabbaths. I am the roaring wave (James 1:6), while he is the voice of many waters (Ezekiel 43:2; Revelation 1:15). He speaks to these waters and commands them (Matthew 8:27). These songs mold us in the image of Christ; we begin to sound like him, singing with the voice of many waters and the sound of pealing thunders: “Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigns” (Revelation 19:6).
Indeed, waves and breakers present a perfect image for the human person, flowing through God’s time. The Psalter dispels the illusion of a false dichotomy between interior and exterior. It is the emergence of what was interior and the retraction of what was superficial that characterizes a person’s journey. The curling, enveloping, spitting, and receding tidal motions reflect humanity’s essence—depths and shallows, interiorities and exteriorities. They reflect a self that is exposed, cast down, hidden, revealed, folded up, and rolled out in spreading foam along the shore. The Psalter brings our waves into the shadow of the Galilean, Lord of the Sabbath, who speaks over our tumult, “Peace, be still” (Mark 4:39). For how can a wave search itself unless governed by the one who rules the flood (Psalm 29:10, 89:9, 93:4; Isaiah 51:15)?
This Lent, in our pursuit of rest for our souls, self-examination, and a closer union with Christ, let us turn to the Psalter and find there the Songs of Jesus, whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light, even though it takes the form of a cross (Matthew 11:30, 16:24-26). There is no sabbath in oneself, but there is abundant rest in singing the Psalms with the Prince of Peace.
Image: David by Jozef Israëls (1899). Rijksmuseum, Europeana. Europeana CC0 Images, courtesy of Canva.
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