Clicking and scrolling to clarity

A daily prayer schedule sounds like a formidable thing, and the way
religious communities do daily prayer, it is. I once attended a
monastic retreat where we prayed in the chapel five times a
day--stunning to us, but it was the monks' daily routine! Luckily, as
with so many other things, the Internet's made it easier for weekend
warrior pray-ers to share in the joys of an activity as done by true
professionals. Lately, I've been adding the daily Psalm hosted by the Erie Benedictines, a community of women best known for blessing the world with Sr. Joan Chittister, to the list of more frivolous blogs I check daily. (When you go to the link, it probably won't have the passages I'm citing--it changes daily and isn't archived, alas.) The Benedictines have a translation done by a sister which uses inclusive language for God and people, and the site leads you through a brief meditation on a daily Psalm. It's so refreshing to take a moment to redirect myself to what's important that I wonder where my sanity would be without it.

The great thing about the way monastic communities deal with Scripture
is that they usually rotate through the whole thing, leaving seekers
to deal with the text's relevance or irrelevance to their own lives.
When you're presented with a seemingly random Psalm, it might express
your present emotions exactly; it might leave you cold, showing where
else your thoughts lie in the moment, or the strength of the biblical
language could help put your problems in perspective.

For example, I was angry at myself for putting too many things off
until later, leaving myself with harder tasks because I didn't have
the discipline to plan them well. How humbling to pray from Psalm 38:

I am buried by my iniquities;
this is a burden too heavy to bear,
the result of my own folly.
I am bowed down, overcome.
I mourn all day long.

My body burns with fever. [In my case, the self-administered
affliction of a sunburn.]
Spent and utterly crushed,
I cry aloud in anguish of heart.

In another moment, this vision of pain imposed by crushing guilt might
have accurately traced my sentiments, but in my current situation it
helped me wonder if I wasn't whining too much--to God and to
myself--about all the "iniquities" of my own "folly." After all,

I trust in you, O God.
It is you who will answer.
I wait and pray,
"Do not let them mock me,
those who gloat when my foot slips."

Like me, the Psalmist can't quite get past worldly concerns--those
imagined mocking others, a constant throughout the ages!--but still
turns to God in trust. Fine, go ahead with your charges against
yourself, the Psalm seems to say, but remember Who you have to come
back to when you're through.

The anonymous prayer leader who writes the site recommends that we
turn immediately from our knowledge of our own failings to compassion
for those of others. "In the stillness of your heart," she wrote,
"open yourself to someone who has angered you. Forgive."