trying times, we often turn to the familiar: a lifelong friend, a staple recipe, an album that has worn deep grooves in our mind. When the world outside is worrisome and strange, we seek the proven solace of the known.
Perhaps that’s why more Christians are turning to the Psalms these days. The lived-in nature of this ancient text makes it suitable for the extremities of our lives. Picture Augustine of Hippo meditating on four Psalms in the waning days of his life or Christ himself quoting the Psalter as he hung from a Roman cross.
Yet the comfort of the Psalms is not always apparent. What are we to make of, for instance, Psalm 69’s vengeance, the violence in Psalm 137, or the tone of hatred at the end of Psalm 139? How can we see through the shadowy valleys—in this sacred book and in our lives—to arrive at God’s goodness and rest?
It was this kind of questioning of the Psalter, amid the present sorrows of his life, that drew the famous and beloved C. S. Lewis deeper into its pages.
In 1950, Lewis got a fan letter from an American woman named Joy Gresham. Having been a bachelor for more than half a century, he eventually fell for Joy, and the two were married in April 1956. Just six months later, Joy took a nasty spill and broke her left femur. After she received X-rays in Oxfordshire, they found out she had bone cancer.
In this season—living in the high of newfound love and the hardship of disease—Lewis had an idea for a book. He began writing it in June 1957 and finished it that October, and it was published the following September. The book was Reflections on the Psalms.
Though Lewis called it “a very unambitious little work,” it was his only monograph focused entirely on a single book of the Bible. In that regard, it paints a vivid and vital picture of how Lewis approached the Scriptures—even the more stomach-turning texts.
This is precisely where Lewis begins the book: the unsavory elements of the Psalter. Following what he calls “nursery gastronomy”—eating the least appetizing items on the plate first—Lewis frontloads Reflections with the most unpalatable passages.
He tackles three topics right out of the gate: judgment, cursings, and death. It is in the chapter on cursings that he states plainly what many Christians may be embarrassed to admit: “In some of the Psalms the spirit of hatred which strikes us in the face is like the heat from a furnace mouth.” These are not words written by a man with contempt for God’s Word. Rather, Lewis’s deep reverence for the Bible compels him to face it with honesty and charity—even when he feels the fire of its offense.
I was a wide-eyed pastor laboring to preach the Psalms when I learned of Lewis’s Reflections. The more insightful I found it, the more confounded I was that no one had mentioned it to me before. In retrospect, this should have been unsurprising, since it is a humble book—both in reception and in design.
It was humbly received in that it remains something of a deep cut in the C. S. Lewis canon. (If Goodreads stats are any indication, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has just shy of 3 million ratings, while as of writing this, Reflections has garnered only a little more than 8,700—quite modest for a work by Lewis.)
The book was humbly designed in that Lewis did not intend it as a full-fledged biblical commentary—to its credit. He doesn’t plod through chapter by chapter; he skates deftly over the Psalter as a whole, hitting some of the thorniest questions facing faithful readers of Scripture. It is, above all, an approach to Psalms gestated in worship, born through years of praying these passages over and over—“sometimes by my enjoyment of them,” Lewis writes, “sometimes by meeting with what at first I could not enjoy.”
One of the most potent texts he tackles in the cursings chapter is Psalm 137. This nine-verse lament over the destruction of Jerusalem composes some of the loveliest poetry in the Bible. “By the rivers of Babylon,” it begins, “there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion” (v. 1, NRSVue).
The horror and heartbreak of Israel’s exile form the backdrop as agony, longing, and defiance seem to spill from every line. “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” the poet asks, until finally his anger crescendos to a repulsive finish: “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” (Or in Eugene Peterson’s stark paraphrase: “Yes, a reward to the one who grabs your babies and smashes their heads on the rocks!”)
How is one to read such blood-soaked poetry? How is one to read it as God’s Word? In many ways, C. S. Lewis is precisely the man to teach us.
Not only did Lewis live through World War II in England, but also he was a veteran of World War I. His first published work (under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton) was a cycle of poems called Spirits in Bondage—most of which he wrote as a young atheist in the trenches of the Great War.
The second poem in the cycle, “French Nocturne,” ends in grim misanthropy: “I am a wolf. Back to the world again, / And speech of fellow-brutes that once were men / Our throats can bark for slaughter: cannot sing.” (We can even hear echoes of the psalmist’s lack of singing in Babylon.) Spirits in Bondage is not a great work of art, but its lyrics gurgle up from the same miry pit that fed the darkest parts of the Psalter.
When Lewis comes to Psalm 137 as a mature Christian writing Reflections, he comes with an entire life’s worth of suffering, poetry, violence, and death. He comes as a man who knows the fittingness of anger in the face of colossal atrocities—yet one who recognizes the need to filter such anger through the prism of Christ’s teachings.
“The ferocious parts of the Psalms,” Lewis writes, “serve as a reminder that there is in the world such a thing as wickedness and that it (if not its perpetrators) is hateful to God. In that way, however dangerous the human distortion may be, His word sounds through these passages too.”
For Lewis, the purpose of a verse like Psalm 137:9 is revelation: It raises the curtain on unvarnished human emotion. It unveils the natural outgrowth of oppression and amplifies our longing for justice to the highest amperage. It holds a shattered mirror to the ugliness of our own hatreds.
In his own way and time, Lewis anticipates another perspective from our era. In his book Reading While Black, Esau McCaulley also addresses Psalm 137 in a chapter on “The Bible and Black Anger.” In it, he finds a kinship between Israel’s exilic tragedies and the brutalization of Black people in the antebellum South:
What kind of prayer would you expect Israel to pray after watching the murder of their children and the destruction of their families? What kinds of words of vengeance lingered in the hearts of the Black slave women and men when they found themselves at the mercy of their enslavers’ passions?
The apostle Paul writes that all Scripture is inspired by God (2 Tim. 3:16). Perhaps the primary purpose of a text like Psalm 137 is “rebuking” and “correcting.”
“God wanted Israel and us to know what human sin had done to the powerless,” McCaulley continues. “By recording this in Israel’s sacred texts, God made their problems our problems. Psalm 137 calls on the gathered community to make sure that this type of trauma is never repeated.”
Less than two years after Reflections was published, Lewis’s wife, Joy, succumbed to cancer. After a season of improvement, a flickering of life and hope, the disease came sweeping back. During the aftermath of losing his wife, Lewis kept a journal that would eventually become A Grief Observed (originally published under a pseudonym).
In raw, even chilling candor, Lewis documents his experience of mourning the woman who had become his world. To read C. S. Lewis—famed defender of the Christian faith—questioning the goodness of God is akin to finding fury in the Psalms. More than once, Lewis references Christ’s dying quotation of Psalm 22, and then he shouts out of his own godforsakenness: “Time after time, when [God] seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture.”
Later in the book, Lewis reflects on his outbursts with the same wisdom he applied in his book on the Psalms. Just as he once wrestled with the “cursings” in the psalms of lament, he now reexamines the raw anger he unleashed in his own grief journal.
Looking back, he acknowledges the deeper impulse behind his words: “All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred,” he writes later on in A Grief Observed. “I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back.”
In other words, Lewis recognizes a kind of Psalm 137 pattern playing out in his own suffering psyche; his former ranting said less about God and more about the universal human experience of grief in the presence of God.
Just as he brought his life’s tragedies to bear in reading the Psalms, Lewis brought the Psalms to bear in his reading of life’s tragedies. In a kind of cross-shaped irony, the most barbaric parts of the Psalter can be used by God to free us, to lift us up from the abyss, “out of the mud and mire” (Ps. 40:2).
In Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis gives us a wise and humane framework for understanding Scripture’s more scandalous parts. But that is just the beginning of what he offers in this humble work. Ranging over a wide array of topics, Lewis not only stokes our desire to pray the Psalms; he also helps us to see Christ in them.
He celebrates that the God who became flesh in Jesus also humbled himself to the lines of the Psalter. As Lewis writes in the book’s opening pages: “Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.”
My wife is a photographer, and I have been awed by the images she captured in places like Yosemite and the Rockies. In these settings, wide-angle lenses allow her to be close to the subjects while including a vast expanse of background material. This is the kind of work C. S. Lewis does in Reflections on the Psalms.
Though starting with little light on the dark side of the Psalms, Lewis includes an astoundingly diverse array of insights and metaphors from otherwise distant regions. He guides the reader’s eye by drawing near to the Psalter while situating it in the broad sweep of human culture, nature, and history.
Most of all, he does this in a way that helps Christians see the enduring beauty of the Psalms—even and especially the gruesome ones. He helps us to sing, to read, and to pray them.
Lewis proves himself to be, in the words of Stanley Hauerwas, “a trusted friend in Christ”; a man who has seen wars, joys, and sorrows up close; a man of deep learning, who wears that learning lightly enough to walk us through the valley to new vistas of faith.
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