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Book Review:

Maureen McCabe, OCSO Inside the Psalms, Reflections for Novices.
Monastic Wisdom Series Number Three. Forward by Bernardo Bonowitz, OCSO. Cistercian Publications Kalamazoo, Michigan. 2005 ISBN-13: 978-0-87907-009-0 Available:sales@litpress.org

I was packing for some travels and put this little book (135 pp.) on my suitcase. As I had a little extra time sat down to skim it for a moment. Read the intro and first two chapters. The Preface: The Formative Power of the Psalms and Psalm 1: Meditatio Day and Night and Psalm 2: Communion in Christ.

I put the book back on my desk and did not take it along. This book was deep and steep. It deserved a systematic and careful read. Don’t open if you think it is one more devout testimonial to the psalms.

Abbess Maureen has put together a lifetime of lectio on the psalms. This book is tightly edited to provide almost 30 psalms and a teaching. Each chapter has a theme taken from the psalm then served richly with other sources, mostly from the Cistercian tradition, The Rule of Benedict, or St. Gertrud.

These themes come out of lived monastic life: total sacrifice of the ego for the sake of communion with God and others. To manifest thoughts to a wise elder as Benedict directs in step five of the 12 steps toward Humility has a rich context in Psalm 32.

Like myself the author memorized most of the psalms while herself a novice. Then, she prayed them for almost 40 years. Finally, for at least ten years taught the psalms to novices.

In America this is as saturated as it gets into the very same prayers that Our Lord prayed and still prays today through the likes of Maureen McCabe. “For one who is struggling against evil thoughts while they are still young, these prayers of Christ, these precious distillations of all Scripture, are an incomparable strength and source of healing. Be it acedia or anxiety or whatever, I know that my mind cannot long withstand the force of a psalm verse repeated faithfully and earnestly. These tiny, secret, divine words cause an inner sun to rise and rivers of peace to flow. (p.4).

Some of those words, like visit, gaze, rest, lift up my soul, glory, overshadowing, and Benedict’s use of the word “run” are carefully taught to those who, like myself, might miss the significance because we are dulled by the routine recitations of the psalms and of the Rule of Benedict.

She quotes John Cassian at length to underscore the centrality of Christ in Scripture:

Thriving on the pasturage that they always offer and taking into himself all the dispositions of the psalms, he will begin to repeat them and to treat them in is profound compunction of heart not as if they were composed by the prophet but as if they were his own utterances and his own prayer.

Certainly he will consider that they are directed to his own person, and he will recognize that their words were not only achieved by and in the prophet in times past, but that they are daily borne out and fulfilled in him.

For divine Scripture is clearer and its inmost organs, so to speak, are revealed to us when our experience not only perceives but also even anticipates its thought, and the meanings of the words are disclosed to us not by exegesis but by proof.

When we have the same disposition in our heart with which each psalm was sung or written down, then we shall become like its author, grasping its significance beforehand rather than afterward…Having been instructed in this way, with our dispositions for our teachers, we shall grasp this as something seen rather than heard, and from the inner disposition of the heart we shall bring forth not what has been committed to memory but what is inborn in the very nature of things.

Thus we shall penetrate its meaning not through the written text but with experience leading the way. So it is that our mind will arrive at the incorruptible prayer…that is not only not laid hold of by the sight of some image, but it cannot even be grasped by any word or phrase.

Rather, once the mind’s attentiveness has been set ablaze, it is called forth in an unspeakable ecstasy of heart and with an insatiable gladness of spirit. (John Cassian Conferences, translated by Boniface Ramsey New York: Paulist Press, 1997) pp. 384-385)

This is a serious book and deserves total attention to read from cover to cover. She gives us an example, those of us who pick up our office books hour after hour, day after day. We need to note what she says, but more than that, do what she does.

Meg Funk
Beech Grove, Indiana