Write Your Own Psalm: a spiritual formation exercise 

Here is a resource that my wife, Kelly, and I developed as a spiritual formation tool for prayer. (You can also download this as a PDF here.)

Prayer is made up of both speaking and listening. We listen to God and we listen to ourselves. We hear God speak and we respond as well. One way we can grow with God and in the life of prayer is by giving space, time, and effort to writing out our thoughts to God. One example of doing this is by writing our own psalm. 

The psalms of the Bible are poetic works of prayer.

As prayer, the psalms reflect spiritual themes of reaching out to God. Different psalms express different aspects of life with God, including praise, thanksgiving, lament, repentance, confidence, and more. There are even some psalms that are wisdom psalms or prayers for royal figures. As with our prayers today, the psalms express the wide range of human emotion to God, including joy, anger, sadness, hope, trust, and more. 

As poetry, the psalms utilize different literary devices to creatively express those thoughts to God. Psalms regularly use metaphors and imagery to express prayer, such as: “Who is the Rock except our God?” (Psalm 18:31), “The Lord is my shepherd” (23:1), “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove! I would fly away and be at rest” (55:6),  “as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (103:12). Biblical poetry, like the psalms, also makes use of parallelism, two or more lines that use different words to express the same or similar ideas (often in similar grammatical form). Three basic forms of parallelism are: 

Synonymous parallelism –expresses similar content more than once in consecutive lines, such as “Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous” (1:5).

Antithetic parallelism – the second line states the truth of the first in a negative way, or introduces a contrast, such as: “For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish” (1:6).

Climactic parallelism – where the second or third line builds upon the first line by repeating it and adding to it for emphasis, creating a sense of escalation or climax, such as: “It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron’s beard, down on the collar of his robe” (133:2). 

The psalms are doubly powerful because of the way the bring together the creativity of poetry and the spirituality of prayer. Now, let’s move toward writing our own original psalm. 

1. First, ask God to guide you as you engage with this spiritual exercise.
2. Begin by choosing a topic of your choice from your spiritual life. It may be an experience, a relationship, a situation in your life, an emotion you hold, or a reality of the world that serves as a starting point. 
3. Next, focus on the content of your psalm. Brainstorm what you are feeling, thinking, and what you want to say to God. Begin writing out your thoughts about this matter.
4. Now creatively reflect on how you want to express that through metaphors or images. Is there a physical object that in some way conveys what you want to say? Is there an animal or aspect of creation, a human relationship or experience that opens up your expression?
5. After brainstorming the content and reflecting creatively on it, begin shaping this into a psalm back to God. You may want to look at a few examples of psalms to guide you. However, don’t merely imitate them. You may want to write with the parallelism mentioned above. 

One structure that might be helpful is:

• Statement of theme
• Development of that theme in one or more of these ways:
  • Repetition (controlling emotion or idea repeated in different words or images)
  • Catalogue (or list) (name and respond to various elements of the theme)
  • Association (move from God’s acts to his character, or vice versa)
  • Contrast (look at the opposite emotion or phenomenon)
• Concluding thought or feeling that rounds off the psalm by resolving the emotion or reflection 

Use your own paper to write your own original psalm.