Agathos music teachers Jennifer Burns and Susannah Sammons will guide us through a musical evening exploring the Power and Purpose of the Psalms: God’s perfect representation of human emotion.

Preview:

We are taught from a very young age to control or regulate our emotions and that responding from our emotions means that we are not thinking clearly and therefore cannot make wise informed decisions.  This leads to a fear of emotions – feeling them or expressing them, yet God created us as emotional beings.  So, what ARE we to do with our emotions?  Knowing our frailty, our weaknesses, our sinful desires, God provided a means by which our emotions can be rightly ordered and redeemed by His grace and mercy – the Psalms.

All the books of Scripture, both Old Testament and New, are inspired by God and useful for instruction, as the apostle says; but to those who really study it the Psalter yields especial treasure. Within it are represented and portrayed in all their great variety the movements of the human soul.  It is like a picture, in which you see yourself portrayed and, seeing, may understand and consequently form yourself upon the pattern given.
– St. Athanasius (from “On the Incarnation”)

Therefore, there is a very real power in and a practical purpose for meditating on the Psalms daily as God’s perfect representation of ALL human emotion.  The power of the Psalms lies within the art forms chosen by God for the expression of our emotions: poetry and music.