Prayer is one of the defining features of monastic life—perhaps the most important one from a practical point of view. It is the thing that monks do ... or they are not monks. And the Psalms are their Book of Prayer par excellence.
Why?
Because it is an unparalleled manual for mystical prayer? Hardly.
Because it is a lucid and simple treatise on the meaning of prayer? No.
Because it is the finest collection of lovely prayers full of deep religious feeling. Huh! Only someone who's never bothered to actually read more than a handful of the biblical psalms could be that deluded.
No, the Psalms are the surest path and among the best teachers of prayer for one simple reason: they are inspired by God with an almost brutal honesty.
The Psalms are real. They tell it as it is. Which is the only way God wants to hear it, so to speak—since it is the way He has given us with which to say it.
There is no point in praying to God as though God were an ignorant micromanager who needs to be in control of every detail of our lives, or a rather vain celebrity who craves sycophantic fans pouring on the pious praises, or some vast oceanic source of the pseudo-mystical warm fuzzies ... or anything else and other than the Truth.
God is not just "true", God is Truth. Prayer is about entering into Truth, being remade in Truth, becoming true, real, God-like.
And the portal into Truth is honesty.
Now, the honest truth is that we can be just as "good, bad and ugly" as the Psalms can feel. Our hearts can be as pure and as broken as the Psalmist's who cries "out of the depths" of despair or with the longing of "a dry waterless land". Whether we sing the praises of the Creator, or grieve and lament our departed dead, or scream in rage against the treachery of false friends, or ponder the sublime mysteries of God's will and ways ... the Psalms give us a template that God Himself inspired and inspires still.
And blessed are they who take up the ten-stringed harp to sing the Lord's song by the running stream under the spreading tree whose leaves never wither or die ...
they shall prosper in all that they do:
in joy and in sorrow,
in peace and in war,
through plenty and famine,
with laughter and tears,
all the days of their life,
unto the ages of ages.
Amen.
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