“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 as good psychologists. They defeat our tendency to try to be holy without being human first.”11
