When things take a turn for the worse—disorientation—our pain comes to expression in lament. When we are restored to a better situation—reorientation—we express thanksgiving to God for a specific deliverance. We can pray authentically at any point on the cycle.
The prayer of the psalms takes our human life, in all its dimensions, very seriously. They are full of “heart” and full of feeling. Nothing in our experience is foreign to our prayer. It is there in the everyday interactions of our lives, in our deeply felt blessings and joys and our deeply suffered pains and hurts, that we respond to our God, the source and root of all life.
The psalms are truly prayers from the heart, from the heart of our persons and from the heart of our lives.
—from St. Anthony Messenger‘s “A Franciscan Celebration of the Psalms“
featuring Michael Guinan, OFM
