Praying the Psalms with Augustine and Friends

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Praying the Psalms with Augustine and Friends

I am far more comfortable talking about what a psalm means than in navigating hundreds of years of church history to discover how others have read and prayed it. I know so little about the life and times of most of the people you will meet in this book. I met many of them for the first time as I was working on this project. When I was asked to write this book, I planned to say no. Two things changed my mind. First, my teenage daughter begged me to say yes. Eliana is a philosophy major in the Honors Program at George Fox University. She loves reading ancient texts, and she wanted to help. The chance to work on a mother-daughter project was enticing. Second, I had a dream (literally). It was not the typical process-random- parts-of-my-day-with-a-strange-combination-of-people- from-my-entire-life kind of dream. It seemed significant. As I awoke the next morning the interpretation took shape. It felt like a message from God straight to me. The dream was a single image, a painting. It looked like a Greek Orthodox icon (which is outside of my own church experience). A man was standing on a bridge in the center of the painting, reaching into the “nave” of a church with his left hand to grasp a yellow pear, and extending his right hand to a group of people huddled outside. As I awoke, I somehow knew that the pear represented the Psalms. I was not entirely sure what a “nave” was (though I knew it was some part of cathedral architecture), so I looked it up. The “nave” is the sanctuary of the church where worshipers gather. As I reflected on this dream, it began to make sense.