Chapter Two: The Community That Sang These Words

Before any individual read a psalm privately, a community sang it together. This is not a minor historical footnote. It is structural to what the Psalms are.

Israel's three great annual festivals brought the whole community to Jerusalem. Families traveled from every part of the country. The journey took days. And the traveling company sang. The fifteen psalms marked "Songs of Ascent" — Psalms 120 through 134 — are the ones pilgrims sang on that road.

Psalm 120 begins in a place most people recognize immediately:

For too long I have had to reside with those who hate peace. I am committed to peace, but when I speak, they want to make war. — Psalm 120:6–7, NET

This is the starting condition of the pilgrimage. Not triumphant departure from a comfortable life, but the weary acknowledgment of where you are actually coming from. You begin from where you actually are.

By Psalm 121 the traveler is looking up:

I look up toward the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, the Creator of heaven and earth! — Psalm 121:1–2, NET

Not the hills. The one who made the hills. The help does not come from impressive things. It comes from the one who made the impressive things, who does not slumber, who keeps the going out and the coming in.

The psalms move through the community's experience across the next ten: the joy of arriving in Jerusalem, the cry for mercy from those who despise the whole enterprise, the confidence that God has not let the wicked permanently win, the tears that turn to harvest:

Those who shed tears as they plant will shout for joy when they reap the harvest. The one who weeps as he walks along, carrying his bag of seed, will certainly come in with a shout of joy, carrying his sheaves of grain. — Psalm 126:5–6, NET

And then Psalm 130:

From the deep water I cry out to you, O Lord. O Lord, listen to me! Pay attention to my plea for mercy! If you, O Lord, were to keep track of sins, O Lord, who could stand before you?

I rely on the Lord, I rely on Him with my whole being; I wait for His assuring word. I yearn for the Lord, more than watchmen do for the morning — yes, more than watchmen do for the morning.

O Israel, hope in the Lord, for the Lord exhibits loyal love, and is more than willing to deliver. He will deliver Israel from all the consequences of their sins. — Psalm 130:1–3, 5–8, NET

That is the pilgrim who has been carrying all of it — the disorientation, the contempt, the long road, the years of tears — and who has arrived at the bottom and cried from there. And then the individual cry reaches back out to the whole community. All of us are waiting for the morning.

What You Lose When You Go Alone

On any given Sunday, someone in the room is in Psalm 88 — in the darkness that does not lift, the grief that has no resolution. Someone else is in Psalm 103 — overwhelmed with gratitude. Someone is in Psalm 44 — faithful, doing everything right, and still suffering, and genuinely confused. Someone is in Psalm 19 — standing under the sky and simply marveling.

When the community prays the Psalms together, all of those conditions are simultaneously before God. The person in the dark is surrounded by people whose praise is real. The person in the joy is surrounded by people whose grief is real. Neither is performing. Both are present. The community is doing something together that none of them can do individually — they are holding the full range of human experience before God at once.

The individual voice is real and it matters — the "I" of the Psalms is the genuine individual speaking from their genuine condition. But the "I" is always embedded in the "we." Your particular midnight is real. It is also ancient. Three thousand years of voices have prayed the same words in the same dark. They are praying with you now.

Psalm 133 closes the Songs of Ascent collection with the image that makes this possible:

Look! How good and how pleasant it is when brothers live together! It is like fine oil poured on the head which flows down the beard. — Psalm 133:1–2, NET

The oil runs down, abundant, overflowing, apparently wasteful in its generosity. Unity is not the absence of difference. It is the presence of the anointing that makes the community more than the sum of its members. You cannot have it alone.