Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
Writing With the Psalms
First of all, Happy St. Paddy’s day. As a Murphy, I can claim my Irish heritage and I don’t have to wear green. It’s church for me this morning, and I am the prayer chaplain, so wearing my bright green long sleeve T-shirt with “MURPHY” emblazoned on the front might not be appropriate. Yesterday, Jan ran into our upstairs neighbor in the parking garage. She was wearing Lucky Charms socks, a green outfit and a silly looking St. Patrick’s day hat. I wish I had seen her, but Jan’s description was enough to remind me that this weekend everyone thinks they are Irish. To celebrate the eve of, Jan and I found a rom-com filmed in Ireland. The story was dumb, but the scenery was glorious. Maybe we’ll get back to the beauty of Ireland some day.
Also yesterday, Jan talked to a friend of ours living in Brooklyn. John is a college professor and a lay Episcopalian monk. I met him not long after I met Jan. He is a lovely person. When my daughter, Jackie, moved to New York City I asked John to be a resource person for her and he graciously took on the task. Knowing he was there if she needed anything soothed my mom’s worry about her living in the city that never sleeps.
Anyway, in the course of their conversation John said he is working with the Psalms and is having difficulty with them. This is not an unusual reaction to these ancient poems. They are full of humanity’s shortcomings in the form of pleadings with God to fix them. Some are downright violent, with images of dashing babies on the rocks and other troublesome visions of how to be a bad human. But, there are beautiful, compelling passages about God and Creation as well.
Jan told John that I wrote a book about the psalms some years ago. He is interested in reading it, so I went to Amazon and ordered a copy to be delivered to him. It amused me to see a little message on the page, “Only one copy left!”. That’s a marketing gimmick, for sure. This book is not best-seller but it has meaning for its readers. I say this because anyone I know who has read it has given me such positive feedback that I remember why I wrote it.
I guess this blog is a shameless promotion of years of my work with the psalms. When I say “my work” I mean that for six years I read a psalm a day and journaled on whatever it called forth for me. I went through nine different editions of the psalms. After I joined Unity, an inspiration came to me to re-write all 150 psalms using Unity principles and New Thought concepts. It took me a year of daily writing to translate each poem and then annotate it with passages from my journals.
I self-published the book. This is a labor of love with some limited expectations for success. Self-publishing means there is no agent to pitch the book to publishers, no marketing campaign, no travel to promote the finished product. Instead I sent copies to friends who then recommended the book to their friends, and there were some sales. People wrote to me about how the book had affected them. Some people used it as a daily meditation, reading one psalm a day. Some told me how it had gotten them through a difficult time. A few people introduced it to a study group at their church.
I don’t know if the book will resonate with John. I hope it smooths the troubled waters he is experiencing as he interacts with each psalm. That’s why I wrote it in the first place.