When I was a young musician first learning to play jazz, it seemed to me an incredibly free, beautiful, yet altogether mysterious form of expression. I would listen and wonder to myself: “How do they know which notes to play?” But in spite of the mystery, I could hear shapes and order and form. It made sense; in fact, it sounded to me like its own kind of language. Indeed, when listening to other kinds of music (classical, rock, blues, etc), it was obvious that each of them was distinct in its own special way. They each had their own “vocabulary”. They used all the same notes, but in very different ways and combinations, so that you could hear not only the personality of the musical style, but even of the individual musicians themselves. The “jazz” of John Coltrane is as immediately recognizable as the “classical” music of Beethoven. They each have their own language, their own voice.

How did they get there? Hearing a discernible language was one thing, but learning to speak it was another. Nonetheless, I managed to learn the way most jazz musicians do, through a process of imitation, assimilation, and ultimately innovation. That is to say, I had to start by mimicking what someone else had played, one laborious note at a time. Each song, each individual musician, had a different voice, and as I learned to play what they were playing and assimilate it all together, I eventually began to develop my own voice. I learned to speak “jazz”.

The Psalms help us learn to praise God by giving us a vocabulary for it. The beauty of this is the way it shapes our affections, our emotions, our mind, our heart. The Psalms give full voice to the entire range of human experience, but they are constantly driving and plowing that experience into God. I remember early in my Christian life, thinking to myself, “I should be able to tell God that I love him,” and yet feeling that it would have been insincere and hence untrue of me to do so. Yet as I learned to pray through the Psalms, they gave me a vocabulary for praising and loving God that ended up being the medium through which my love for him became real. Although I started with “imitation”, that eventually helped me to internalize what I was praying, and the more I did that, the more it became ingrained into the vocabulary of my soul, so that in less premeditated moments, when a situation in life would just hit me, what came out of my heart was what I had been plowing into it for weeks and months: the Psalms.

But it wasn’t necessarily any particular Psalm. It wasn’t like I was learning memory verses from the Bible to be rehearsed at will (although that is a good thing, too). I was learning to speak Psalm-ese. They have just become a part of who I am in and before God. And although the number of words are finite, the depth of meaning and application is infinite. This means that I will always be in the cycle of imitation and assimilation, with occasional moments where the Psalms pray me, instead of me praying them. Once in a while, innovation happens. But I believe that at those moments, I am an instrument in God’s hands, and that he is the great Innovator. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name!

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