"The Paradox of the Psalms"

In Kathleen Norris' book, The Cloister Walk, she writes on the "Paradox of the Psalms" and how pain and praise are ingredients that need one another. She says,

The value of this great songbook of the Bible lies not in the fact that singing praise can alleviate pain but that the painful images we find there are essential for praise, that without them, praise is meaningless. It becomes the 'dreadful cheer' that Minnesota author Carol Bly has complained of in generic American Christianity, which blinds itself to pain and thereby makes a falsehood of its praise.

This rang true for me personally. It's one of those things worth pondering for a while, to fill the time, to evoke some worship among the brokenness--not because it's a duty, but because we find human meaning in it.

So I leave it with you.