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So thinking about the Psalms, I got a lot of help from St Athanasius, who wrote this letter, which I encourage everyone to read. It’s called The Letter to Marcellinus, and it’s a text all about the Psalms. And he says some amazing things about the Psalms that if you don’t mind, I’d like to share. He says, in other books of scripture, we read or hear the words of holy men as belonging only to those who spoke them, So I think we can think of the Psalms as sort of given to us to make the depth of the self as one of the things we hear. But what they also do is they take into account the subject matter of our own nature. Not at all as though they were our own. And in the same way, the doings they are narrated are to us material for wonder and examples to be followed, but not in any sense things we have done ourselves with the Psalms, though, except for prophecies about the Savior. to make the depth of the self accessible to us, right? That under normal situations, it’s not fully transparent to us. And we fail to understand the movements of the soul, I guess is another way of putting it, and that the songs kind of help us to see those movements of the soul in ourselves. So I- Yeah, and it’s not what’s interesting too about the songs is that it’s not only a kind of whitewashing, like you can imagine it that way. It’s like, no, it’s just, it’s trying, it’s moralizing, it’s trying to make you into the right person, it’s trying to force you to think certain ways. No, like the cries of despair and of anger and of wanting revenge, like all of these are part of the experience of reading the songs. It’s not at all a cleansed version of human experience. It’s a very rich and deep and sometimes very dark version of it. I mean, to be honest, some of them are difficult to read, you know, especially the prayer for vengeance. And it’s hard to know what to do. They’re famously difficult for people to work with, maybe we should just be thinking about the demons as our enemies, for example. And, but I don’t know, I think some of the songs are about people. And very- But I think that if you see it more as something that encompasses the fullness of human experience and tries to, so if you see just the song for vengeance as being isolated on its own, then of course it doesn’t hold. But if you understand it as this, it’s a part of a musical symphony where there’s this moment of dark, you know, and of anger and of asking God to be your hand just to get done with you want. But then there are other moments where it expands into a loftier vision of what is possible, you know. No, I like that very much. I think, and I think that’s a good counsel, sort of reading songs together, right? It’s sort of like, you can obviously take an individual one and do whatever you want with it, but like taking them together is I think the right move, just interpret- Yeah, which is actually for all scripture, that’s what you need to do. Because if you just read the book of Judges alone, like you’ll go crazy. But if you read the early books and you read the prophetic books and this call for the Spirit of God to be on our flesh, and you get this big story, then all of a sudden, even the harsher parts, they tend to look like little movements in a grand symphony, you know. Right, right. No, that’s, yeah. And Psalms is a kind of microcosm of scripture, right? Like that’s another thing you find in the Fathers a lot is this reference to the Psalms as being like a mini like Bible unto itself. And, you know, it was divided into five books to mirror the five books of the Pentateuch. So it really bears kind of reading in that holistic way. founder of theHoustic