The Psalmist enjoys a very personal relationship with God. His moods alternate between extravagant praise and downcast irritation, between high aspiration and dark despair, between universal charity and sharp cursing of enemies. Some of these moods are quite embarrassing to the aspiring Christian, and provide grist to the mill of a sophisticated generation that finds religious observance generally distasteful because of the demands it makes on its personal integrity. If the declarations of the Psalmist are as banal as this, we can well do without them and follow some more contemporary spirituality, so would run the argument. But in the end we are forced back upon ourselves, and the finest intentions tend to founder in a shallow sea of selfishness, jealousy and petty dishonesty, to say nothing of various sexual misdemeanours. In a wiser moment we may be thrown back upon the ageless wisdom of the psalms, and see ourselves disconcertingly portrayed in more than one of its vignettes. Human creativity seems to have no end, but human nature remains distressingly immature; suffering well digested seems an inevitable precursor of the growing process, and the Bible is a useful commentary in the lives of many of its protagonists. The psalms themselves are essentially anonymous, but the characters it delineates can usually be matched by what we feel inside ourself.

The longest of them all is Psalm 119. As the admirable footnote in the Standard Edition of the Jerusalem Bible tells us, the psalm is one of the most remarkable monuments of Israelite devotion to the divine revelation. The Law or one of its corresponding terms, like decree, precept, statute, promise, commandment, word, judgement or way, is found in nearly every one of the 176 verses. But more than simply a lengthy eulogy on the Law, it is also an allegory of the soul's travail in search of God, whose ways are enshrined in the Law. There is first of all a passage of praise to God for his Law and a pledge to conform to it (the psalm is conveniently read in sequences of sixteen verses):

How may a young man lead a clean life?
By holding to your words.
With all my heart I seek you;
do not let me stray from your commandments.

Then comes the descent into the world of affairs with all its temptations to conform to its baser counsels; the Psalmist invokes the divine help in his moments of isolation, and the Law is his constant consolation. There follows a prayer for God's help that he may understand the Law better:

Teach me, Lord, the way of your statutes,
and in keeping them I shall find my reward.
Give me the insight to obey your law
and keep it wholeheartedly.

It would seem that the supplication has been heard, for the writer shows a much more resolute frame of mind, but soon he is confronted once again with human hostility, and calls frantically on the name of the Lord for help. As he battles with everyday events, so the fruit of suffering becomes more apparent. The outcome of this encounter is a greater wisdom that in turn facilitates an understanding of the Law.

You are good, and what you do is good;
teach me your statutes.
I follow your precepts wholeheartedly . . .
How good it is for me to have been chastened,
so that I might be schooled in your statutes!
The law you have ordained means more to me
than a fortune in gold and silver.

Indeed, it is the experience of suffering that makes the law shine more radiantly inasmuch as travail cuts down to size all previously valued commodities:

Let your love comfort me,
as you have promised me, your servant,
Extend your compassion to me, that I may live,
for your law is my delight.

But the pain does not diminish:

Though I shrivel like a wineskin in the smoke,
I do not forget your statutes.
How long must I, your servant, wait?
When will you execute judgement on my persecutors?

Once again the divine assistance comes just in time to save him:

Had your law not been my delight,
I should have perished in my distress;
never shall I forget your precepts,
for through them you have given me life.

But the menace of the wicked ones still lies in wait to attack him; God alone is his strength:

I see all things have an end,
but your commandment has no limit.

The wisdom already known now grows in authority, for God is the source of this quality which is beyond all price:

Your word is a lamp to my feet,
a light on my path;
I have bound myself by oath and solemn vow
to keep your just decrees . . .
Every day I take my life in my hands,
yet I never forget your law.

And so the psalm moves on to its slow close: continual suffering, prayer to God, strength given, and the path of life resolutely trodden. The Psalmist is outraged at the arrogance with which the world treats God and his supreme revelation, the Law. Nevertheless he is aware how far from God he himself remains despite his protestations of loyalty:

In your dealings with me, Lord, show your love
and teach me your statutes.
I am your servant; give me insight
to understand your instruction.

In his work for God and his righteousness he is continually assailed by the foe:

I am speechless with indignation
at my enemies' neglect of your words.
Your promise has been well tested,
and I love it, Lord.
I may be despised and of little account,
but I do not forget your precepts.

And so the Psalmist continues to pray faithfully to God, though constantly pursued by malicious enemies, who in fact are the unenlightened people of the world whose god is their own senses. To gratify them is their life's end.

Seven times each day I praise you for the justice of your decrees.

The final verse is especially moving:

I have strayed like a lost sheep;
come, search for your servant,
for I have not forgotten your commandments.

This is the essential human condition, striving for an excellence that is deeply implanted within the soul and being repeatedly drawn away from the great quest by diverting, though essentially trivial, mundane considerations. Nevertheless, like the constantly apostasizing people of Israel, we are drawn back to the work by prophets without and the divine spark within; the former relight the latter when it is all but extinguished by the crowd pressing in on it. The lovely Psalm 42-43 (despite their separate numbers they are really one continuous entreaty to God) expresses the lament of a devout Jew, a Levite, who finds himself in exile from Jerusalem and its Temple, the focus of true worship to the one God.

As a hind longs for the running streams,
so I long for you, my God.
I thirst for God, the living God;
when shall I come to appear in his presence?

He cries bitter tears when the foreigners ask where his God is. He remembers in deep distress the glorious march to the Temple in the past:

How deep I am sunk in misery, groaning in my distress!
I shall wait for God; I shall yet praise him,
my deliverer, my God.

The pain of past memories contrasting with the humiliation and loneliness of the present punctuate the progress of the psalm:

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your cataracts,
and all your waves, all your breakers, sweep over me.

At the same time, however, there is an even deeper hope:

By day the Lord grants his unfailing love;
at night his praise is upon my lips,
a prayer to the God of my life.

Rather like Psalm 119, but in much smaller compass and with a stark tragedy to relate, the course of this psalm contrasts the divine help and the pain of the present time. But there is strength to wait in patience for God's deliverance. In the Psalm 43 portion it would seem that the writer has had to contend with evil people in addition to being exiled from his home, somewhat reminiscent of the suffering Christ, but once again there is a deeper trust in God's future providence.

While alive in the flesh we are all necessarily exiles from the kingdom of God, which, as Wordsworth put it in his "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" in Recollections of Early Childhood, is our true home. Just as the Israelites learned many valuable lessons in patience, humility and diligence during their Babylonian exile, so that they could return home as fully-fledged Jews ready to receive the teaching of Ezra, so we too learn similar lessons on the hard path of life. Bereavement, of which exile is a special category, teaches us to lay no great stress on worldly things, even human relationships if used to allay loneliness, but to put our trust in God alone, who is the supreme imperishable amid a chaos of change and destruction. In the psalm the Temple is the sacrament of the divine presence, but that too had to be destroyed before a new one could be built by the returning exiles under the leadership of Zerubbabel. The chastened community worshipped more devoutly than in the past, because they had been deprived of their overall power and depended entirely on the kindness of the ruling countries and the love of God. But even the second Temple was eventually destroyed in AD 70, and has never been replaced. The vicissitudes of life bring us home, from where we originally set out but now for the first time really knowing its contours, as T. S. Eliot reflected at the end of Little Gidding. That home is heaven, but of a very different nature from the traditional abode portrayed in fiction. It is full of the sweat and hard work of the multitudes working together for the healing of creation and the coming again of the Lord: "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away" (Mark 13:31).

Fortunately, however, our lives are not only a continual saga of pain and exile. There is also a joyful side, full of wonder and delight. So runs the short, lovely Psalm 8. Here, in contrast with Psalm 19, the glory of God in creation is juxtaposed with human frailty, seen in its most moving form, in the person of a little child:

Your majesty is praised as high as the heavens,
from the mouths of babes and infants at the breast.

When the Psalmist contemplates the immensity of the heavenly firmament, he marvels equally at the significance the Creator has placed in his human creation. He is a frail mortal, and yet he has been made little less than a god, crowned, at least potentially, with glory and honour. All the other created forms of our world, animal, plant and mineral, are under human control. In the time of the Bible this subjection of the earth to human domination was neutral, if not always benign, but now its malignant propensity is too well known to demand special comment; a century that has witnessed wholesale genocide is only now reacting sharply to the destruction of the ecological systems upon which we all depend for our sustenance.

When I look up at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
at the moon and the stars you have set in place,
what is a frail mortal, that you should be mindful of him,
a human being, that you should take notice of him?

This too is the human condition: we have been made little less than a god, which in this context means a creature with a will sufficiently free to make conscious moral choices. In the Creation allegory Adam and Eve appropriated the way of moral choice, figuratively partaking of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, without prior reference to the Creator God. We cannot in fact know true moral judgement apart from divine guidance; once we take matters into our own hands without reference to a higher source, we make ourselves gods and the final results are always unfortunate. We begin to judge and condemn other people when viewed against the backcloth of our own prejudices. When we return to the second simplicity of childhood, we are open in innocence to the call of the present moment, and the Creator can work with us as responsible partners in the never-ending work of maintaining what is and creating what is to be. We add our unique contribution under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The fine series of psalms from 120 to 134 are entitled collectively Songs of the Ascents. They are all, with the exception of Psalm 132, short, and were sung by pilgrims on the way to Jerusalem. This could form a magnificent theme for meditation: a company of pilgrims chanting these lovely psalms, each replete with fiery emotion tempered with the wisdom of experience and the reticence of past humiliation, as they march through waterless valleys to the great city, as Psalm 84, another song of pilgrimage, so beautifully puts it. Each psalm speaks to the human condition because it relates eternal truths of that condition, as does all authentic spiritual writing.
    One of the favourites of the series is Psalm 121:

If I lift up my eyes to the hills,
where shall I find help?
My help comes only from the Lord,
maker of heaven and earth.

The psalm confesses our human impotence apart from the divine assistance. If we play our part he will not let us make a false movement, for he is our guardian and he never falls asleep, unlike even the most trustworthy human protection. Neither the sun nor the moon can assail us against the loving care of God, our supreme guardian as we come and go, now and forever more. In this life, nevertheless, we shall not escape danger and trouble as common experience shows us, but we need not be overwhelmingly fearful provided we establish a good relationship with God, by the practice of prayer, during the more peaceful periods.

The most significant verse is the first, quoted above. There is no help from even the mightiest potentates or the most impressive occult systems of philosophy. They all fail when they are most urgently required, for they are the works of human hands. As servants they all have their uses, but as guides they soon become idols that prevent the rugged pilgrimage to our own Jerusalem, which is essentially a type of the City of God in the heavens. And yet anyone engaged in wholehearted pilgrimage is in that city even now as he trudges wearily along. It is the love and dedication of his fellows on the way that bring him to a city not built with hands that is eternal. This is where the help comes from as our eyes are lifted up in aspiration.

Psalm 124 celebrates the survival of the Israelites after some battle; it may have been one of the numerous skirmishes recorded in the Books of Samuel or Kings, or even more significantly, the survival of the people after Babylonian captivity, remembering how the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) were completely destroyed by the Assyrian hosts. Indeed the amazing story of the survival of the Jews up to our own time is a worthy continuation of this theme:

If the Lord had not been on our side -
let Israel now say -
if the Lord had not been on our side
when our foes attacked,
then they would have swallowed us alive
in the heat of their anger against us.

The Psalmist blesses God for his protective power, that the people escaped like a bird from the fowler's trap. He ends by re-echoing the second verse of Psalm 121, "My help comes only from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth." Indeed our own welfare day by day is an act of pure divine grace. When we have the time for a moment's quiet recollection of a single day's activities, we will soon have cause to say, "But for the grace of God this dreadful thing might have occurred." Unfortunately we are usually so preoccupied with our current concerns that we forget to thank God for his overall protection. The chequered history of the Jews made their awareness more acute.

Blessed be the Lord who did not leave us
a prey for their teeth.

This psalm is especially pertinent for those who have survived some personal ordeal; a major cancer operation is a topical example, another is the humiliating experience of redundancy. As we grow older, so we begin to recognize the teaching value of adversity bravely confronted. We learn to depend less on outer circumstances and more on ourselves, who in turn are inspired by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Israelites lost everything time after time, as did their Jewish descendants after some terrible persecution, but a mysterious spirit of hope deep within them kept them on the move when every logical escape seemed impossible. This again is part of the human condition; it leads to faith which in turn is fertilized by action.
    Another favourite is Psalm 127:

Unless the Lord builds the house,
its builders labour in vain.
Unless the Lord keeps watch over the city,
the watchman stands guard in vain.

The Psalmist goes on to deride those who strive so hard for the things of this world, for God supplies the need of those he loves, who, I would add, following the development of this theme in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 6:25-34), is everything he has caused to be created. Needless to say, all this admonition does not absolve us from our work in building edifices, keeping watch at all times lest we fail to receive Christ when he comes again, at the same time maintaining the earth in as fine a condition as possible, or seeing to our day-to-day needs. If we fail to play our part we shall certainly starve and the world return to primeval chaos. On the other hand if we work proudly on our own we shall simply construct a tower of Babel that will disintegrate under the force of our mutual discord. The ominous events of our own technologically-advanced century underline this warning.

The psalm ends with an exaltation of human fecundity with the usual emphasis on sons rather than daughters that runs through the Bible. Already in Genesis 1:22 we read of the blessing given by God to those who are obediently fertile, a blessing to be repeated in verse 28 in respect of the human being. In a more modern context where overcrowding is a major world problem, fertility and fruitfulness can be seen in a more constructive light as a proper husbanding of our own talents. In this way the world can be better managed.

The next psalm (128) exalts family life still further. A fruitful wife and numerous sons around the table are seen as a blessing for those who fear God. To this joy is added prosperity and happiness. The psalm ends with the prayer:

May the Lord bless you from Zion;
may you rejoice in the prosperity of Jerusalem
all the days of your life.
And may you live to see your children's children!
Peace be on Israel!

This perspective is typical of the Psalmist; with only a few exceptions his vision is limited to this world. Fertility, prosperity and longevity are the three prizes to which he strains. In themselves they are not to be derided, but their attainment can lead to a smug complacency even when the good of the whole community is borne in mind. There is a nobler, and more realistic, theme to our life: suffering bravely undergone so that we may grow in the eternal knowledge of God. This statement must be made in respect of those who are not fertile, or whose lives, through no apparent fault of their own, do not move in circles of material prosperity or personal health, whether physical or mental. It is most profitable to read Psalms 127 and 128 in the context of Psalm 124: an expression of spontaneous relief and consequent praise to God for the essentials of life that have been granted after some terrible trial. The remarkable history of the Jews throughout the ages amplifies this theme.

A final psalm that illustrates the human condition is one of simple humility. Psalm 131 breathes a childlike trust in the Lord, and as such is good to repeat just before going to sleep at night. There is no pride of heart or haughtiness of eyes, nor does the Psalmist busy himself with great affairs or matters too intricate for his simple brain. He says:

But I am calm and quiet
like a weaned child clinging to its mother.
Israel, hope in the Lord,
now for evermore.

When Jesus told his disciples, "Whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will never enter it" (Mark 10:15), he was capturing the meaning of this psalm perfectly. It is important to distinguish between childlikeness and childishness. The childish person is centred on the ego which demands recognition and will not be satisfied until it has won the local conflict. The childlike person, by contrast, is centred on the spirit of the soul where God is known. There is therefore no personal striving but only a complete surrender of the self to God. In such a situation, once the individual has been educated in the school of life, there can be a proper alignment of the divine will and that of the person. In this transaction neither of the two wills is dominant. On the contrary, each works to the fullness of its capacity so that the power of God may come down to earth in the person of the aspirant.

It is right for the young child to be childish, for only thus will its demands be satisfied, but when it grows beyond its parental roof it will be obliged to adapt to many different types of experience if it is to survive. If we all remained at a childish state, we would fight against each other for pre-eminence, and the end would be destruction. Thus St Paul is right: "When I was a child I spoke like a child, reasoned like a child; but when I grew up I finished with childish things" (1 Cor. 13:11). But we should retain at least something of the primeval childlike wonder and trust of our youth, especially in the midst of a cynical materialistic society. In this way we may bring a knowledge of God to our weary fellows, even when neither we nor they understand what is happening. This is the most telling way of evangelism.