If the Bible is smudged with human fingerprints, then the Psalms may give us the blotchiest pages of all. They are, in the words of British Benedictine Sebastian Moore, “rough-hewn from earthy experience.”10 “The Psalms don’t theologize or explain anger away,” wrote author and poet Kathleen Norris, who studied the Psalter as a Benedictine oblate. “One reason for this is that the Psalms are poetry, and poetry’s function is not to explain but to offer images and stories that resonate with our lives. . . . In expressing all the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the Psalms act
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