Those biblical psalms that begin plaintively nearly always end in confidence and intelligent resignation. A subtle but sure movement carries such prayers towards the closure of response.
‘To you I call, O Lord my Rock’, the writer of the twenty-eighth psalm tells his Creator, ‘Do not turn a deaf ear to me. For if you remain silent, I will be like those who have gone down to the pit.’
No theatrical poser, the pray-er spells out a life or death situation and the impotence that defines his inability to do anything but address Heaven. Yet, irresistibly, he is drawn towards what seems an antithetical or dubiously pious security.
The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him and I am helped. My heart leaps for joy and I will give thanks to him in song.
The double harvest of the writer is paradigmatic rather than accidental. He experiences not only help—one assumes that this comes in the form of a concrete and specific deliverance from his plight—but also trust. His heart is reconfigured even as his risk-laden reality is reshaped.
‘You turned my wailing’, in the words of the thirtieth psalm, ‘into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.’
The logic is one and the same. Deliverance is sure, but circumstantial change is merely the precursor to a heart’s conversion. The energy of weeping now fuels the dance.
Such is the spirituality of biblical prayer. Modern reductions of prayer’s effect to a healing, soothing outcome on the central nervous system have a point, as all appealing reductions do. Prayer does indeed change the ‘heart’ and, without doubt, turn the pray-er to face wholeness rather than disintegration.
So does the bumper sticker theology that assures road rage candidates that ‘Prayer changes things’ rest on its portion of the truth.
Yet the spirituality of the psalms will resist all such reductions. God is not only in the details, nor does he linger softly only in matters of the heart. Neither small space is sufficient for housing a deity who is just present and just powerful enough to have turned desperation into confidence and wailing into dance.
Canter Bridge 
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