Psalms with Jesus

The cold surf in which I walked in early morning during my retreat in early June.
For several months now as I pray the psalms morning and evening I ask Jesus to help me to pray them with him back when he walked the earth and I ask him to pray them now in me and through me and with me and with all those who have ever prayed them through thousands of years and all around the world.  It has helped me to pray psalms whose thoughts seem foreign to me.
This praying has also been helped by Gerhard Lohfink's excellent book, Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was.  In the chapter on Jesus and the Old Testament he says that Jesus probably knew all the psalms by heart. 
Those psalms that are harsh and cruel have always been a problem for me.  Lohfink says, "How liberating it can be if we are permitted, for once, to express all our wrath and misery in words....Many texts of the Bible, by calling violence what it is, function precisely to reveal the violence in society that is normally covered up, and to disclose its reality as merciless injustice."