The Psalms in wartime

This evening after dinner we read Psalm 27, which I thought appropriate in light of the events of the past hours. Here is something I wrote for the Center for Public Justice eight years ago, which I thought relevant to the current crisis: One Hundred Years Later: The Psalms and the First World War. An excerpt:

Nearly four decades ago, I visited Prague, the capital of what was still communist-ruled Czechoslovakia and, before the First World War, part of Austria-Hungary. During my time there, I purchased in an antiquarian bookshop a Czech-language New Testament and Psalms published in 1845 for “Evangelical Christians of the Augsburg and Helvetic Confessions,” that is, for Lutheran and Reformed Christians. The print was in the old German black letter font, and even some of the spelling was obsolete.

It was not until seven years ago that I noticed something interesting about the Psalms in this volume. An early owner of the book, whose surname was Lány, read through the Psalms at the pace of approximately one psalm per day (except, of course, for Psalm 119), taking time to mark the date at the top of each. He started with Psalm 1 on “1./8.”, or the 1^st day of August 1914, and continued until he read Psalm 150 on “18./I. 1915,” that is, the 18^th of January 1915.

I am convinced that the timing of his praying through the Psalms was not accidental. War had broken out four days earlier, and the whole world would shortly be swept up in the developing conflict. Whether Lány had sons who might be subject to conscription or whether he feared for the safety of his home and community cannot be known for certain.

However, as the Battle of Tannenberg was raging to the north, Lány was praying a most fitting prayer from Psalm 27: “Though a host encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war arise against me, yet I will be confident.” Not long thereafter, on the very day that Russia defeated Austria at the Battle of Rawa, Lány prayed the following from Psalm 42: “I say to God, my rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me? Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?’ As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’”

The Psalms may have provided comfort to Lány, or they may have expressed his fears and anger in the opening weeks of the war. Of course, in praying through the Psalms he was doing nothing new; he was only following the examples of the early church, of St. Benedict’ s Rule, and even of his own church community, which I suspect may have been Lutheran.

 Read the entire article here.