Reading the Psalter

No book is used more in Orthodox services than the Psalms. They open and close the daily prayers, thread through Vespers and Matins, and supply the verses sung between the readings at the Liturgy. The Church prays them because Christ prayed them — from the Cross He cried out a psalm's opening words, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me" — and because they contain, as the Fathers loved to say, the whole of Scripture in miniature: creation and fall, exile and return, penitence and praise, the coming of the Messiah.

What makes the Psalms unique is that they are God's word given back to us as our word. The rest of Scripture speaks to us; the Psalms put speech in our mouths. When you cannot find your own words — in grief, in guilt, in sudden joy — the Psalter has already written the prayer. St. Athanasius observed that most of Scripture speaks to us, but the Psalms speak for us, becoming the voice of the one who prays them.

For liturgical use the Psalter is divided into twenty sections called kathismata (from the Greek for "sitting," because the faithful may sit while they are read). Each kathisma is further split into three parts called stases. This division lets the community read straight through all 150 psalms in the course of a single week — and, during the weekdays of Great Lent, twice in a week, when extra kathismata are added to the services. In practice only larger monasteries still keep the full round; parishes read what the day appoints.

One point often confuses newcomers. Orthodox books number the Psalms by the ancient Greek Septuagint, which the early Church used, and this runs one number behind the Hebrew numbering found in most English Bibles for most of the book (because the Septuagint joins two Hebrew psalms into one early on). So the great penitential psalm the Church calls Psalm 50 — "Have mercy upon me, O God" — is Psalm 51 in a King James Bible, and Psalm 118, the long meditation on God's law, is Psalm 119. The words are identical; only the label differs.

A layperson does not need to attempt the monastic marathon. The tradition's counsel is small and steady: read one kathisma, or even a few psalms, as part of a daily prayer rule, slowly and aloud enough to hear yourself, letting the words become your own petition. Some keep the ancient habit of Psalm 50 each morning as a prayer of repentance, or Psalm 90 ("He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High") for protection. The Psalter is also the Church's prayer for the living and, especially, for the departed, read beside the body before burial.

The aim is not to finish but to be formed. "Blessed is the man" who delights in God's law, the Psalter begins, "and in his law doth he meditate day and night" (Psalm 1:2). Read this way, over months and years, the Psalms slowly retune the heart — teaching it to lament without despair, to rejoice without vanity, and to keep turning, in every weather of the soul, back toward God. This is why the Fathers urged Christians to learn them by heart: a memorized psalm becomes a prayer always ready, a companion for the road, a seed of unceasing prayer.