Wendell Kimbrough
I grew up in a church that occasionally sang out of a Psalter. I hated it.
I remember being a kid—ten, twelve, maybe fourteen (old enough to have opinions about music)—and dreading the times we were asked to grab the thin volume of psalms next to our trusty old red hymnal. The pianist would strike up a familiar hymn tune, and our small congregation would meander our way through a strange and interminably long text. “Yoda speak” abounded (“He has no help, though he on God relies”), much of the imagery made no sense to me, and many of the tunes did violence to the emotional timbre of the texts we sang. Maybe one or two out of ten of these “metrical psalms,” as I later learned to call them, would resonate, but most of them I was ready to never see again.
Inoculated Against Psalm Singing
It turns out that many churchgoers have been inoculated against psalm singing by experiences like mine. In a recent seminary class I audited, the students, from a wide variety of traditions, were asked, “Why is psalm singing so rare in the North American church?” The most frequent response was similar to my story: “We heard psalms done in a way that failed to resonate with us, and we concluded psalm singing just wasn’t for us.”
Today, ironically, I am a songwriter who spends most of his creative energy writing settings of the psalms. It took me 20 years to rediscover the psalms and catch a vision for how to bring them to life for corporate worship. But it is my great passion to wrestle with the psalms, set them to music, and share them with congregations in a way that unlocks their power to move and form us.
How did it take me 20 years to get back to the psalms? The answer, at least in part, is that the horizons of my imagination were inhibited by an unhelpful biblical literalism.
Literalism, Poetry, and Song
I grew up in the Reformed tradition and am grateful to have absorbed its reverence for the authority of Scripture. Unfortunately, with that reverence came a broad-stroke translation philosophy that “literal is always better.” I remember hearing, at church camp of all places, conversations about how “dynamic equivalent” translations were inferior to more literal translations. I understood that taking the Bible seriously meant literalism.
Today I believe that taking the psalms seriously as liturgical art requires artists and musicians to approach them with imagination and creativity. And I want to argue that a more imaginative approach to the psalms is actually more faithful to Scripture than a strict adherence to literalism. Turning ancient Hebrew poetry into compelling songs in another language (in my case, English) requires an approach that puts equal or greater weight on the emotional impact of the poem-song in its destination language as it does on representation of the exact Hebrew text.
What happens when you translate a psalm without permission to creatively re-imagine some of its content? You go line by line, looking at Hebrew vocabulary and syntax, carefully rendering them into their closest English equivalent. This is a great way to produce a historical document, something that allows us to study a psalm in its original context and make sense of it. It does not necessarily produce a powerful, poetic song. In fact, in many cases, it produces the opposite: a song that is confusing, limited by imagery that distracts and has no emotional meaning to the listener.
Bulls of Bashan?
Let me give an example. Psalm 22 is a powerful, compelling psalm. It takes us on a journey from the cross to the resurrection, with many stops along the way. But when we get to verse 12, suddenly the psalmist is surrounded by “strong bulls of Bashan.”
If I am in church singing a line-by-line literal setting of Psalm 22, verse 12 will distract me and take me out of any emotional journey I may have been on up to that point. “What are bulls of Bashan?” I will wonder to myself. Instead of feeling the terror or grief the psalmist may have intended, a literal rendering pushes me into a posture of critical reflection. In other words, this imagery that would have no doubt been compelling to David’s listeners has the opposite effect on me in English because the image does not carry emotional weight in my culture.
It is of course remarkable that the psalms are so universal in their content that even a strictly literal translation of these ancient poems can produce poetry that is compelling in any language. But when you bring an overactive impulse toward biblical literalism into poetry translation, you end up with enough cumbersome, confusing moments that congregants will often stumble their way through much like I did as a kid. Strictly literal translations may be faithful to the Hebrew text, but are they faithful to the intent of the author of the psalms?
God Gave Us Songs
Think with me about God’s intent in giving us the Book of Psalms. Why did God choose to give us a book of raw, gritty, emotionally intense poem-songs in the middle of our biblical canon?
When someone writes a poem or a song they don’t do so primarily to educate or inform us. That can be achieved better through other genres. Poetry and song are the genres of emotion. We write songs because we want to move our audience and connect with them emotionally. God gave us a book of inspired songs because God wants a relationship with us as whole beings. He is after our hearts, not just our minds. God seeks a relationship with us that is intimate, honest, and real, so he gave us a book of inspired songs to help us sing our deepest feelings to him.
What does this mean for songwriters and artists seeking to create faithful liturgical expressions of the psalms? It means it is more important for our art to produce a faithful emotional engagement with God than it is for us to check the box of representing every line of Hebrew text. It means allowing ourselves some creative freedom to reimagine the psalms, finding language and imagery that will carry emotional weight in our home culture.
For me, this was a liberating conclusion. As an adult, I served as a songwriter and worship leader for years but never set psalms to music because I felt stuck between two bad options: either serving biblical literalism and producing obtuse settings of the psalms, or being “unfaithful” to the Scriptures by not being literal. Needless to say, my creativity did not flourish in that space.
Unintended Consequences
Another unintended consequence of the “literal is always better” approach to psalm setting is the neglect of more difficult psalms in worship. If we are afraid to reimagine the psalms, we will stick to singing only those psalms whose imagery and meaning translate easily into compelling English language poetry. These are also often the psalms that express emotions and ideas we are comfortable with in our cultural contexts. Look for psalms in most churches’ song repertoires and you will see what I mean: most of us sing some version of Psalm 23 with its language of quiet trust and God’s favor, but few of us sing Psalm 133 with its images of oil running down Aaron’s beard. (And yet how the church needs songs about the goodness of dwelling in unity!)
When churches avoid portions of the Psalter in worship, major areas of our lives do not get discipled. What we do not express in worship does not get formed in worship. If, for example, we never sing the psalms that teach us to bring our anger, our fear, or our confusion to God, we implicitly teach our churches that those emotions have no place in the life of faith. Our congregants learn to hide them away, pretending they do not have anger, fear, or confusion. And in this way, we can remain emotional infants, never learning what faithful anger, faithful fear, or faithful doubt look like.
An Emotionally Healthy Church
I dream of a day when the church’s songbook mirrors the emotional content of the whole Psalter. We will be a healthier, more honest, and more humble church when that day comes. But how will we get there? We need to give the artists, songwriters, and musicians in our churches permission to creatively interpret the psalms for liturgical use. We need to pray for them to have courage to take risks, and for our churches to be safe places for them to wrestle with Scripture. Pastors must encourage artists and provide resources for illuminating the psalms in their original meaning so that artists are empowered to creatively interpret them with nuance and depth.
In my journey, the psalms came to life precisely when church leadership gave me this kind of permission and encouragement. In my Anglican church, we follow the Lectionary (RCL) and have a psalm appointed for each Sunday. My pastor asked me to begin writing a musical refrain to accompany the psalm each week. At first I was daunted by this task because of all the complications I’ve listed above. (What if what I wrote wasn’t faithful enough to the Scriptures?) But as I began to wrestle with a new psalm week after week, sharing the results with my congregation on Sunday and inviting them to sing with me, I saw firsthand how powerful singing the psalms could be. It became clear to me through practice and through listening to my congregation’s engagement with what I wrote that the deep pastoral need is for emotional engagement.
When we come to church, whether we consciously realize it or not, we all hope to experience intimacy with God. We long to know God sees us, welcomes us with all of our messiness, and embraces us with love. What a great gift it is when we arrive at church and are given rich poetic language to help us sing about our deepest pains, our gratitude, and everything in between. The psalms are an enormous gift to the church and much needed today. We just need the courage to engage them with a little holy imagination.
Wendell Kimbrough is a songwriter and worship leader in Fairhope, Alabama. You can hear his psalm settings and learn more about his music by visiting wendellk.com.
Image: Psalm 22, St. Albans Psalter