Psalms Through the Year: Spiritual Exercises for Every Day

Editorial Reviews. Review. "I have never read a better study of the Psalms" -- Dr. C. Arthur Christiansen, Dean Emeritus, Dana College "Marshall Johnson brings.
Table of contents


  • The Book of Psalms: Prayers for Everyday Living.
  • Fitness Training | Our Daily Bread?
  • Psalms through the year : spiritual exercises for every day.
  • Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent-Handling Tradition;

There is nothing of faith in it, no sense of God. The sentiment of the line from Psalm 95, however, expresses a conviction central to Hebrew and Christian faith, that we live a life in dialogue with God. The contrast between those two seven-beat lines has, ever since, been for me a paradigm illustrating that truth. Yet how do we hear the voice of God? Our Christian tradition has at least four answers to that question.

Psalms Through the Year: Spiritual Exercises for Every Day

First, along with the faithful of most religions, we perceive the divine in what God has made, creation itself that insight sits at the heart of Christian moral thinking. Finally, we hear God by attending to our experience, and interpreting it in the light of all those other ways of hearing the divine voice—the structures of creation, the Bible, the living tradition of the community. If God wants to communicate with us, it has to happen in the course of a hour day, for we live in no other time. And how do we go about this kind of listening?

The examen , or examination, of conscience is an ancient practice in the church. In fact, even before Christianity, the Pythagoreans and the Stoics promoted a version of the practice. It is what most of us Catholics were taught to do to prepare for confession.


  1. To Ride on Sunbeams.
  2. Die Geliebte: Geschichte einer Leidenschaft (German Edition);
  3. Psalms Through the Year: Spiritual Exercises for Every Day - Marshall Johnson - Google Книги.
  4. Ignatius includes it as one of the exercises in his manual The Spiritual Exercises. It is still a salutary thing to do but wears thin as a lifelong, daily practice. It is hard to motivate yourself to keep searching your experience for how you sinned. Now prayer that deals with the full contents of your consciousness lets you cast your net much more broadly than prayer that limits itself to the contents of conscience, or moral awareness.

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    A number of people—most famously, George Aschenbrenner, SJ, in an article in Review for Religious —have developed this idea in profoundly practical ways. Recently, the Institute of Jesuit Sources in St. American Jesuit Identity and the Examen of Conscience, What I am proposing here is a way of doing the examen that works for me.

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    It puts a special emphasis on feelings, for reasons that I hope will become apparent. First, I describe the format. Second, I invite you to spend a few minutes actually doing it. Third, I describe some of the consequences that I have discovered to flow from this kind of prayer. Since we are not simply daydreaming or reminiscing but rather looking for some sense of how the Spirit of God is leading us, it only makes sense to pray for some illumination.

    The goal is not simply memory but graced understanding. Review the day in thanksgiving. Note how different this is from looking immediately for your sins. Nobody likes to poke around in the memory bank to uncover smallness, weakness, lack of generosity. But everybody likes beautiful gifts, and that is precisely what the past 24 hours contain—gifts of existence, work, relationships, food, challenges. Gratitude is the foundation of our whole relationship with God.

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    An Ignatian Prayer Adventure: Week 1: Love, Freedom, and Purpose

    If you have an immediate prayer need, please call our hour prayer line at The psalmist attempts no evasion of responsibility whatsoever. Although he knows what he has done, he does not inform us: The confession, "Against you, you alone, have I sinned," does not indicate that he had committed a cultic offense that did not involve other human beings.

    It is instead similar to David's confession after committing adultery with Bathsheba: Sin is a transgression of a command from God, and thus all sin is against God, whether it has injured another human being or not. When we stand before the ultimate Judge, we can offer no excuses. Theologians have had a field day with statements like verse 5: But the psalmist is not articulating any theory of original sin nor of the supposed evil of the act of procreation.

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    His overwhelming sense of guilt causes him to admit that his entire life has exhibited a tendency to rebel. His thought reminds us of Job's lament: How can one born of a woman be pure?