A wise mentor and spiritual director has instructed me to pray the Psalms. “The Psalms are the school of prayer par excellence,” said he. The Psalms are given to us in scripture as response to what is revealed in scripture. They cover the entire range of human emotion and experience. My spiritual director said, “Faithfully immerse yourself in these prayers and you will develop a rich prayer vocabulary. Make it a discipline like doing daily exercise for your body – spiritual exercise. Do it every day, weather you want to or not. Don’t settle for anything less.” Knowing that I needed and wanted something deeper in my prayer life I took the advice of my mentor and began to pray about 8 psalms a day. It’s disturbing stuff! Lots of complaining and lots of pleading for destruction of enemies.
  I have always loved parts of the book of Psalms but I have had a hard time with what are known as the imprecatory Psalms. To imprecate is to invoke evil or curse upon someone. The majority of the kind of prayer in the psalms is a kind of crying out to God against enemies and trouble, sometimes asking God to destroy those enemies in very graphic and explicit terms. What enemies could I have against which I would hurl such venom? There was part of me that would like to take a scissors and cut that nasty stuff out of the bible. How do you pray this stuff?
  Then I began to realize that I, like all of us, have my demons and plenty of trouble. There is a liar who whispers in my ear. There is a tempter who would take me down the road to destruction.
  There is my own sinful flesh and the gospel of bandage that glitters in the world. My enemies are the very things that we renounce in the baptismal liturgy…
• The devil and all the forces that defy God
• The powers of this world that rebel against God
• The ways of sin that draw us away from God
  These are our enemies which are for me mostly internal. It makes good sense to plead with God that they be brought down. Why not pray that anything that would separate us from God be destroyed or that we be delivered from it.
  As God’s kingdom is manifested in our world and in our lives there is inevitably traumatic reversal and renewal. The end of the old order is underway. May God come to our aid to destroy those enemies that would defy and rebel and draw us from God. May we rejoice in God’s hearing of our complaints and curses as well as our praise.
Now, go pray some salms!                                                                             Pastor Steve