You Can Translate It And Not Pray It

He can tell you what every word of it is doing and he has not been able to pray it for a year.

The forty second psalm. He has worked through it properly: the structure, the refrain, the shape of the two halves, the odd business with the waterfalls. He knows what the hart panting after the water brooks is doing grammatically and he knows why the refrain repeats and what changes the second time.

He could teach it. He has taught it.

He cannot say it to God.

It started, as far as he can date it, some time last summer. He noticed one evening that he had read a psalm and had done nothing with it except understand it, and that this had probably been true for a while.

Now it is a year and it has spread. It is most of the psalms. He opens the book and something in him goes into a particular gear, and the gear is a good one and it is not a wrong gear, and it is not the one that prays.

He is fifty. He has been reading Hebrew for eleven years.

And here is the thing he said to himself in his own study in March, which is the reason for this article. He said, out loud, in an empty room: "I have read my way out of it."

That is a serious accusation for a man to make against his own study, and he does not entirely believe it, and it has not gone away either.

In the night his song shall be with me

The psalm he has been dissecting has a line in it that is doing something he has probably parsed and never received.

Yet the Lord will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.Psalm 42:8

Take that at the desk. You are being handed a song rather than asked to compose one. The word says in the night his song shall be with me, and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies what a dry man was never going to produce.

His song. Not the psalmist's song. The Lord's.

Read the ownership in that clause. In the night, the song that is with the man is described as belonging to God, which means it was given rather than composed, and it arrives in the dark rather than being prepared in the light.

And notice the pairing at the end: his song, and my prayer. The song is His and the prayer is mine and they sit in the same sentence, and the order is the giving first.

So take this at your desk, and know it is not my correction, it is what is written: something is being given to you in this, and it does not have to be produced by you. His word says in the night His song shall be with me, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that giving, in a dry year, to a man who can parse the verse and cannot say it.

There was a family in England in the seventeen hundreds who wrote six thousand hymns, and the elder brother was a serious scholar: Oxford, Greek, Hebrew, a man who edited and abridged and annotated all his life.

He did not stop studying. He never once treated learning as the enemy of devotion, and neither should you, and any version of this article that tells you your Hebrew is the problem is wrong and I will not write it.

But watch what he actually did with the psalms.

He sang them. He put the whole psalter into meter with his brother, so that ordinary people, and he himself, could sing them rather than only read them. He wrote in his journal about repeating a verse to himself on horseback for a whole afternoon.

He had two gears and he used both. Study in the study. And then the same text, out loud, in a different mode entirely, in a voice, addressed to somebody.

The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the way he held both with a psalm was to sing the thing he had just analyzed.