For several Lenten seasons past, I have nurtured a vague penitential ambition to get up close and personal with the collection of Old Testament poems known as The Psalms. In one sense, of course, the texts have been familiar since childhood, slabs of them having been intoned regularly and dutifully - if with a marked lack of enthusiasm - at services in my local church. In adulthood it seemed wiser to avoid them, for they struck me as the preserve of the super-pious. Dot Cotton of EastEnders, for example; religious warriors armed with an apparently endless supply of quotations so sharply righteous you could, if you weren't careful, cut yourself on them, writes Arminta Wallace
In recent years, however, I've noticed Psalms turning up in the oddest places. I've found poets borrowing them, composers being inspired by them; thriller writers, even, using them to create an edgy mood. On one occasion, shivering with apprehension at my dentist's, I opened the volume he had left on the waiting-room table - somewhat ghoulishly, I couldn't help thinking - at random. "God is our refuge and strength," it informed me. "A very present help in trouble. Therefore will we not fear." And it went on to whisk up an apocalyptic end-of-the-universe scenario which put the dentist and his drill into the ha'penny place.
Legend ascribes the authorship of the psalms to David, of David and Goliath fame; but then legend says Santa Claus comes down the chimney on Christmas Eve, and I don't buy that one either. Despite a plethora of conflicting theories and lively debates, the bottom line seems to be that nobody really knows who wrote the psalms, or when, though the current consensus seems to be that the collection of 150 pieces contained in the Christian Bible had been assembled in more or less its present form by the third century before the birth of Christ.
The more I read around the Psalms, the more intrigued I became. The mystery of their origins, the sophistication of their literary structure, the vividness of their imagery - and their almost unimaginable age, reaching right back to Babylonian culture, where many of those images originated - combined to make them utterly fascinating. The more I read around them, however, the more I found that on one point, at least, biblical scholars were all singing the same tune. The only way to get a proper handle on the psalms, they advised, was to spend time with them. Lots of time.
For the past three years or so, therefore, the first week of Lent has seen me - having said a mournful farewell to chocolate - digging out one of the assorted volumes which skulk in the depths of the bookshelves and making a determined assault, starting with on Psalm 1. I never get very far, though. Maybe it has something to do with a chocolate-starved nervous system, but I just can't settle down to the task of reading through the Psalms in a logical fashion. Old translations, new translations, I've tried them all. I don't generally get beyond Psalm 40.
This year, a Naxos recording of The Complete Psalms arrived on my desk. Read on three CDs by the actor Alex Jennings, with snatches of silken chant inserted at cunning intervals in the proceedings, it seemed like manna straight from heaven. I inserted the first CD into the hi-fi and settled down. Jennings set off at a brisk pace, his beautifully modulated tones shifting from stout to plaintive through quizzical. Hah! I thought. This will be a doddle. I got as far as Psalm 29. And that, I reckoned, was that - for another year, at least.
But then, in an entirely unrelated moment of extremely un-Lenten self-indulgence, I acquired an iPod. Don't worry - I'm not going to preach about how wonderful iPods are and how you should rush out and get one right away. I just find it remarkable that this 21st-century gizmo offered an instant solution to a problem involving such ancient works of literature. Being a complete technoduffer, I hadn't expected help with this particular problem from the gizmo corner; but as long as I was loading it up with Bach and Brad Mehldau and a generous dollop of unmentionable 1980s easy listening, I thought I might as well give The Complete Psalms another go.
And the iPod did what iPods always do, and treated each psalm as an individual song. Not only that, but it showed a beguiling tendency, when switched into random shuffle mode, to produce precisely the right psalm at precisely the right moment. Set between a chunk of Palestrina and a bit of Sufi music, or U2 in full flow, individual psalms began to sound like. . .well, like individuals. And an endearingly odd bunch of characters at that - some skittish, some cranky, some rapturous, some furious, some terribly, terribly sad. More to the point, getting to know each psalm individually made it much easier to get a feel for the whole. I began to make serious progress.
In his introduction to the Pocket Canon edition of the Book of Psalms, Bono declares them to be "the blues of the Bible". He's not wrong. Both art forms articulate the cry of suffering humanity; but just like the blues, the psalms don't muddle around in misery, but try always to accentuate the positive. They're good for the heart - everybody's heart, not just those of the super-pious - and for the soul, if we have one. And this Lent, I reckon I'm going to make it all the way to Psalm 150. No chocolate on earth could possibly taste as good as that final line: "Praise ye the Lord".