Psalms Part 2: Sitting With Scripture

In my last post, I talked about how reading the Psalms was proving quite difficult for me. Nevertheless, I persevered, and in the end I found a way of approaching the Psalms that seemed to work for me. Admittedly, it involved skipping the ones that I found too difficult or didn’t really connect with (for the time being at least)… Then, once I found ones that I resonated with, I found that simply reading them wasn’t sufficient — I had to do more. But this time it wasn’t study, and it wasn’t looking at the literary structure. I just had to sit with them.

This experience of ‘sitting’ with the Psalms is where the following (lightly edited) reflection came from.

Mar 23 2022

Recently I have been thinking about, and having a go at, ‘sitting’ with scripture.

I’ve read straight through the Old Testament before (with David Boan) - this gave me a bigger picture than I had before.

I’ve studied the scriptures, seeking to read them in an objective and rational way. I particularly like studying the language, and understanding the structure and context (historical, but perhaps especially the literary context).

Sometimes I read ‘heuristically’, reading through (or researching in other ways) to find something in particular, or perhaps with a question in mind.

But recently, as I’ve been going through the Psalms to find ones that I resonate with, it’s occurred to me that once I’ve found these Psalms, I need to do something with them. And I don’t think that something is any of the above approaches to scripture — it’s something else. I think for some of these Psalms, I just need to sit with them. I guess this might be what some people mean when they talk about meditating on scripture. I also think of ‘chewing the cud’.

I noticed something similar when I was looking at the wording of communion once. It had come up that, while traditionally people talk about Jesus’ body being ‘broken’, some people prefer the reading ‘given’. Once I’d done the research and decided that given was the better reading, (and researched the concept of given for a little), I needed to sit with it for awhile. This didn’t involve seeking out more content. It didn’t involve doing more research. It didn’t involve reading other parts of scripture. It just involved sitting with the idea, and sitting with the passages that I’d found, and asking the question “what does it mean for Jesus’ body to be given?” and “How is this different to broken?” and “What am I supposed to do with this?”

Looking back now, I can recall that after studying theology at Vose (or perhaps while studying there), I found the concept of ‘devotional’ reading to be quite challenging (as in I was finding it increasingly untenable for me personally).

I think I had a bunch of presuppositions or preconceptions at play in this struggle. It’s almost like there were only two ways of approaching scripture - ‘studying’ it, or reading it ‘devotionally’. Perhaps I saw one as objective and one as subjective. But I think I had also previously been exposed to a certain culture that was about volume of reading. If you were really holy you’d read through the Bible each year. Or alternatively you’d read through a little devotional where a verse or passage was neatly packaged with someone else’s thoughts about it, or an inspiring story that was related, and you could consume one of these a day.

This is not to say those practices are illegitimate, but I don’t think they work for everyone all the time, and I think my horizons are starting to broaden. I think I’m finally starting to see that there are more ways of approaching scripture than just studying scripture, or reading ‘devotionally’.

A Happy Ending?

Having spent the last few months reflecting on how I engage with scripture, it’s fascinating to see how I pulled together so much of my experience in this one personal reflection on sitting with the Psalms. (I even alluded to some experiences that I haven’t considered for reflection yet!) It seems nice how it ends on a note of hope, and I feel inspired now to go back and sit with some of the Psalms that I resonated with back then, and maybe read through some more to see if I can find others.

At the same time, I feel that to end the series on this note would be a disservice to some of the struggle and tension that I have felt in other parts of my story. For this reason (although really I was planning to do this anyway…), I want to take some time off to reflect on the experiences that I’ve covered so far, and perhaps others that I haven’t, and see what comes to the surface. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to come back with something that captures both the joy and the struggle that I’ve experienced in my interactions with scripture, and maybe the complexity and ambiguity too.

We’ll see what comes of me ‘sitting’ with my experiences 😄