The Book of Psalms has been the prayer book, the songbook, and the refuge of every generation for three thousand years. Here is what it teaches about honest prayer, the gift of lament, finding praise in the dark, and the God who draws near to the brokenhearted.
Hello there, friend.
There is a book that has been read every single day for three thousand years.
It has been read in temples and cathedrals, in prison cells and hospital rooms, in monasteries at four in the morning and in the silence after something has broken beyond repair. It has been read by shepherds and kings, by scholars and by people who had no formal education at all. Every major religious tradition in the Abrahamic lineage has returned to it, generation after generation, as their primary language for talking to God.
The Book of Psalms.
One hundred and fifty poems. Attributed to David and Moses and Asaph and others. Composed across centuries in ancient Hebrew, in the highlands of Judea, in moments of triumph and moments of absolute desolation. Organized into five books, mirroring the five books of the Torah. Sung in Temple worship. Recited in the early Christian communities. Chanted in monasteries. Whispered in extremity by people reaching for the only words that felt adequate.
The Psalms are a human document. And what has kept them alive across all those centuries and all those radically different lives is the precision with which they map every terrain of human emotional experience and refuse to leave any of it outside the conversation with the divine.
Here is what I find in them, and what I carry.
Your Grief Has a Language and the Psalms Gave It to the World
Nearly a third of the entire Psalter is composed of laments. Cries of distress, expressions of abandonment, raw and unguarded articulations of suffering that would sound, in almost any other context, like a failure of faith.
They are anything but.
The lament psalms are some of the most spiritually sophisticated texts ever written, precisely because they refuse the comfort of premature resolution. They hold the darkness fully, and they bring it directly to God, and they demand that God show up.
“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?” — Psalm 13:1-2
This is the language of someone who has been waiting a long time for something that has yet to arrive. Genuinely confused about why God seems absent. Trusting enough to demand an explanation. In enough pain to mean every word.
What the lament psalms model is honest prayer. The kind where you say what is actually happening inside you rather than what you think you are supposed to feel. The kind where the anger and the confusion and the grief get brought into the conversation rather than suppressed in favor of a more acceptable spiritual presentation.
The Psalms give permission for the full range of human experience to be prayer. They say: this is also the conversation. The darkness is also the place where God meets you. The cry is also worship.
“Weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.” — Psalm 30:5
And always, even in the deepest lament, there is a turn. The psalm that begins with abandonment often ends with renewed trust, with a vow of praise, with the psalmist committing to testify to what God has done even before the deliverance has arrived. This is the grammar of lament: full honesty about the darkness, followed by the act of choosing to trust anyway. Both parts are essential. The second is meaningful only because the first was real.
This connects to what we explored in The Hill We Climb: dawn comes even when you cannot see it yet. The lament psalms are the original version of this truth. Name the darkness honestly. Then choose the light anyway.
Your grief deserves language. The Psalms offer it freely. Bring the whole truth of your interior life to prayer, and let the full conversation begin.
Praise Is a Practice and It Changes You Before It Changes Anything Else
On the other end of the emotional spectrum from lament, the Psalms are saturated with praise. And the praise psalms reveal something that is easy to miss: praise, in the Psalms, is almost always a decision rather than a feeling.
The psalmist does not wait until they feel like praising. They praise from within difficulty. They praise in the memory of what God has done when the present evidence seems thin. They praise as an act of reorientation, a deliberate turning of attention from what is missing to what is present.
“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” — Psalm 103:2
The instruction to forget not is significant. The psalmist knows that forgetting is possible. That the mind, under pressure, tends to narrow its attention to what is difficult and lose contact with what is good. The praise psalm is a technology for counteracting that narrowing. It is the deliberate practice of remembering.
Psalm 23, perhaps the most beloved of all the psalms, is structured around this movement. Even in the valley of the shadow of death, the psalmist attests to God’s presence. Even surrounded by enemies, the table is set. Even in the darkest passage, the shepherd is there. The praise does not deny the valley. It finds the presence within it.
“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” — Psalm 23:4
The Psalms of praise also teach something else: gratitude is active. The heavens declare the glory of God, Psalm 19 says, but someone has to stop and look. The earth is full of God’s steadfast love, Psalm 33 says, but someone has to attend to it. The practice of praise is the practice of paying attention to what is genuinely good, genuinely present, genuinely worthy of celebration, even when the attention has to work against the current of anxiety or grief.
This is the same practice at the heart of the seven poets we explored: Ginsberg’s radical attention, Mary Oliver’s one wild and precious life, Dostoyevsky’s beauty that saves the world. The Psalms are the oldest articulation of this practice. Pay attention. Praise is what happens when you do.
Praise is a decision before it is a feeling. Turn the attention deliberately toward what is good. That turning is the whole of the practice.
God Is Nearest to the Brokenhearted: The Promise That Has Kept Millions Going
Among the hundreds of claims made in the Psalms, one has resonated across every culture and every generation with a persistence that suggests it is touching something genuinely true.
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” — Psalm 34:18
In most human frameworks for understanding suffering, brokenness is a state to be overcome, transcended, or hidden. The person who is crushed in spirit is in a condition of weakness, of vulnerability, of apparent distance from God.
The Psalm reverses this completely. The brokenhearted are precisely the ones God draws nearest to. The crushed spirit is a sign of divine proximity rather than divine absence. The very condition that most people are most ashamed of, most eager to conceal, is described here as the condition that most draws the divine near.
This has been a lifeline for people in genuinely extreme circumstances for three thousand years. The person in the hospital bed. The person who has lost the person they love. The person whose life has come apart in ways that cannot be explained or resolved. The person sitting in the rubble of what they had built.
“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” — Psalm 147:3
This means that the brokenness is received. It is held. It is the occasion for a particular quality of divine attention rather than the evidence of divine abandonment.
Kahlil Gibran pointed at the same truth from a different angle in the seven voices letter: the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. The wound is where the healing enters.
The broken place is where God arrives. Your brokenness is an address. That is the whole reversal.
Honest Prayer Is the Most Courageous Thing: What the Psalms Teach About Talking to God
One of the most striking features of the Psalms, taken as a whole, is how little they resemble what most people think prayer is supposed to sound like.
Prayer, in much popular understanding, is composed. It is reverent in a way that means controlled, carefully edited, presenting the best version of one’s spiritual life to God. It says what ought to be felt rather than what is actually felt.
The Psalms will have none of this.
Psalm 88 ends in darkness with no resolution at all, one of the only psalms that does not turn toward hope or praise. It simply ends in the night. Psalm 44 accuses God of having abandoned his people and demands to know why. Psalm 22 opens with a cry of desolation that Jesus himself quoted from the cross.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?” — Psalm 22:1
This is the language of someone in genuine crisis. And the remarkable thing is that it is scripture. It is the language that has been preserved and hallowed and handed down across thousands of years as an authorized form of prayer. The tradition is saying: this too. This anger, this confusion, this raw demand. Bring it.
The Psalms invite us to pray from where we actually are rather than from where we think we should be. They make room for the full interior life to be the material of the conversation with God. Whatever is actually happening inside you is welcome in prayer. The confusion, the anger, the grief, the doubt, the hope, the gratitude, the numbness. All of it is prayer material. All of it is welcome.
This is the same permission Ajahn Chah gives: the practice happens in the middle of your actual life, with your actual mind, in the actual conditions you are in. The Psalms say the same thing about prayer. Bring the real life. Bring the real heart.
Honest prayer is the most courageous form of prayer. Bring the real life, the real heart, the real confusion. God already knows it anyway.
The Psalms of Ascent: Walking Toward the Holy With the People Who Are Walking Beside You
Among the one hundred and fifty psalms, fifteen stand out for their origin and their purpose. Psalms 120 through 134, known as the Psalms of Ascent, were the songs sung by pilgrims walking to Jerusalem for the great festivals of the Jewish year.
These are walking songs. Songs for the road. Songs for a community of people making a journey together, through dusty roads and upward grades, toward a holy center that they are approaching together rather than alone.
“I lift up my eyes to the mountains. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.” — Psalm 121:1-2
The Psalms of Ascent say something important about the communal nature of spiritual life. The journey toward God in these psalms is a group journey. The transformation happens in community, on the road, with the other pilgrims who are tired and dusty and singing anyway.
The Psalms of Ascent also carry a particular quality of resilience. They are songs for people who have been through hard things and are still walking. They speak of enemies, of difficulties, of long roads. And they sing through all of it, because the direction is clear and the company is good.
“Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them.” — Psalm 126:5-6
The tears stop at harvest. The one who sows in weeping will return carrying sheaves in joy. Both the weeping and the singing belong to the same life. The tears are the very conditions in which the seed is planted.
The journey toward the holy is a community journey. Walk with your people. Sing through the hard parts. The harvest comes to those who sow in tears.
Psalm 23 and the God Who Accompanies: The Most Beloved Passage in Three Thousand Years of Prayer
Psalm 23 is twenty-eight lines. It has been translated into hundreds of languages and memorized by hundreds of millions of people. It has been read at bedsides of the dying and at gravesites and in the quiet of ordinary mornings when someone simply needed to remember something true.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul.” — Psalm 23:1-3
The shepherd leads rather than drives. The sheep are guided toward the green pastures. The refreshing of the soul happens through being led to the right place, through trust rather than through effort or striving.
And then the psalm turns.
“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” — Psalm 23:4
The darkest valley is part of the same shepherd’s territory as the green pastures. The accompaniment continues into the shadow, the difficulty, the loss. The comfort is the presence of the shepherd within the valley, rather than the valley’s absence.
The psalm moves from vulnerability to abundance: a table set in the presence of enemies, a cup overflowing, goodness and mercy pursuing the psalmist for the length of a lifetime. This psalm is testimony. It is what someone discovered through actually walking through the darkest valley and coming out the other side, still accompanied, still held.
You are already inside the shepherd’s territory. Even the dark valley. Even the enemies. Even the hardest passage. The accompaniment continues. That is the whole promise.
Six Things the Psalms Have Given the World
01. Permission for honest prayer. Every emotion that has ever moved through a human heart has been brought to God in the Psalms. The anger, the confusion, the grief, the demand, the gratitude, the numbness. All of it is welcome. Bring the real life.
02. Language for lament. The Psalms give words to the unspeakable. They validate the darkness without rushing past it. They hold the grief long enough for it to be real.
03. The practice of praise. Praise in the Psalms is a decision, a deliberate act of attention toward what is good and true and worthy of gratitude, even when the attention has to work against the current of difficulty.
04. The promise of nearness in brokenness. The Lord draws closest to the brokenhearted. The broken place is an address. The depth of the wound is where love arrives.
05. The community of the road. The Psalms of Ascent are walking songs. The journey is communal. The transformation happens with other people, on the road, singing through the hard parts.
06. The shepherd who accompanies. Even the dark valley is shepherd’s territory. The accompaniment continues through every passage. That is the whole promise of Psalm 23, and it is enough.
Three thousand years of daily reading.
Every generation has found something in these one hundred and fifty poems that the previous generation also found, and that no other book has quite managed to supply. The full range of human experience, fully named, fully brought to God, fully held in the space of honest and sustained prayer.
Open to any psalm today. Read it slowly. Let it be a mirror. Let the words that were written in ancient Hebrew in a different world in a different century name something that is alive in you right now.
The Psalms have been doing this for three thousand years. They will do it today.
Start today. Start early. Start with Psalm 23, or Psalm 1, or Psalm 139, or whichever psalm you find yourself turning to when you need the words most.
With love,
Paolo
Try This Today
- Choose one lament psalm today (Psalm 13, 22, or 88 are good places to begin). Read it slowly. Let it name something in your own experience. Then write one sentence: what I would say to God if I were being completely honest right now is…
- Choose one praise psalm (Psalm 23, 100, or 103). Read it aloud. Then write down three things from your own life that this psalm could be praising on your behalf. The specific things. The actual gifts.
- Memorize Psalm 23. Carry it with you. Recite it the next time you are in difficulty. See what it does in the actual moment of the actual valley.
- Read one of the Psalms of Ascent (120 through 134) and ask: who is on the journey with me? Who are the people walking alongside me toward something that matters? Name them. Thank them.
- Find the psalm that is most alive for you right now. Read it every day for one week. Let it become part of the furniture of your inner life.
- Write your own psalm. One page. Begin with where you actually are. End with where you want to arrive. Let the turn happen in the writing.
Keep Going
- You Are Already Inside the Life the Great Ones Were Writing About
- The Forest Monk Who Saw Through Everything: The Essential Wisdom of Ajahn Chah
- How The Hill We Climb Teaches You to Keep Going
- The Four Immeasurables: A Complete Guide to Metta, Karuna, Mudita, and Upekkha