Burn Up Your Psalms

I didn’t realize it was Ash Wednesday until Ash Mid-Afternoon. I was grabbing coffee with a friend when he asked me: “So, you giving up anything for Lent?”

Oh. Right. Lent.

I’ve participated sporadically in Lent over the last decade. Some years I think nothing of it; others, I’ve fasted from food or masturbation. I joked with my friend that maybe I’ll give up coffee some year (God truly be with me).

As our conversation continued, I started pondering aloud this notion of giving up something. This year. Even though I’d devoted approximately zero energies into such a 40-day endeavor before sitting down with him.

I recalled this notion of psalm-writing. Of putting away my Bible and penning my own. My friend across from me had been doing such a thing, slipping his own psalms into a shoebox.

Psalm-writing — or ptalm-writing, if you will (you will). As a writer, I feel it hold such an allure; as a human, too. I’d been wanting to connect with my Creator like this for many months.

Why hadn’t I? What’s been holding me back?

“I’d just want them to be good,” I told my friend. Why waste my time with prayers and groanings that have been prayed or groaned before? I’d want these psalms to be poetic masterpieces with metaphors galore that would make King David himself weep.

I took a sip from my coffee that I definitely wasn’t giving up.

“What if you burned them?” my friend said.

And it was then I knew. I felt the shudder, the recoil, and the intrigue all at once.

What if I burned my psalms so nobody but God himself ever saw them?

I started forming excuses (“What if they’re good?”; “What if I want to post or publish them one day?”; “What if I forget how to recreate any portions?”).

But even as I articulated my concerns, I knew I’d entered a course from which I couldn’t reverse.

What if I wrote my own psalms

and then burned them

not worrying about poetry

or King David’s tears

only outpouring my soul

for an audience of One

and no other?

I went home, and I couldn’t shake the idea; that very night, I embraced it.

I’ve been ptalm-writing for a few nights now. Groanings that may or may not have been groaned before. Good nights and less good ones. Praise and lament. Questions and desperation.

I force myself to fill out an entire page of my journal before ripping out the page.

And then I burn each one.

I kneel in my closet, staring into the flames as they curl from the corners of my page to the center, erasing my words with orange and purple swaths, slinking my psalms to ash, the smoke soaking into my shirt and stinging my eyes and nostrils.

There’s a certain allure to it all. The flames, the page. It’s mesmerizing; it’s disheartening. What have I done? What have I lost?

Night after night, I must face the acceptance that I’ll never again see those words.

Night after night, I must hope that if some spurt of words is meant to survive the mounting ash heap, then it will.

I’m saving my burnt words in a box until Easter morning. I’ll then bury them and step into whatever next looks like.

Some nights I can’t wait to reenter this ritual; others, I must force myself back into the closet to kneel.

As for what I am “giving up” in these 40 days, I suppose it is my spirituality on autopilot. My normalcy. The fifteen minutes before bed I’d have otherwise spent on YouTube or Netflix now go toward my new ritual.

I don’t know what will come by the end of this journey. But I am pressing into the unknown this Lent. I am sparking a new spiritual flame.

Or perhaps rekindling one I’ve not seen in quite some time.