When we pray the psalms we enter the passionate and tumultuous world of human experience.  Many of the psalms speak in a frank and evocative way about pain, sickness, fear, grief, abandonment, desolation, anger, vengeance, desire, hope, trust, relief, abundance, joy, gratitude.  Their authenticity stems from a personal or communal experience which, having become stylized, is passed on to our lips.  If we are willing to align ourselves with the psalmist’s words, however stilted, irrelevant or alien they may at first seem, we receive the inestimable gift of giving voice to the deep cry of humanity to God, and of God to humanity.  The power of the psalmist’s words sometimes outstrip our own attempts to find words for our situation and that of our world.  Many times a particular psalm will give us the courage to speak before God things we would not otherwise have dared to express.  Even those psalms whose spirit of intense anger and vengefulness seem irreconcilable with the Gospel message can be a gift of freedom to us.  They force us to acknowledge that we too have such thoughts and desires within us and it is only in laying open these dark corners of our hearts and world unflinchingly before God’s gaze that we can be set free.  Praying the psalms also opens us to receive God’s word to us: words of comfort and encouragement, words of love and longing, words of judgment, correction and forgiveness.  But public recitation of the psalms is not only about our personal experience.  It is the prayer of the Church, through which we are united with all who pray, with all who cry out in fear or pain, in gladness and joy, with all who have no voice, no freedom to speak or to pray, no words to speak to God, or no God to whom to address themselves.  In praying the psalms we are united with Christ, who stands before the Father in his human body and with his human voice cries out for the salvation of all creation.