Journal Exercise

Undergraduate students taking the Rhythms of Faith course are given journal prompts to help them reflect on how they can connect the concepts of creativity, liturgy, and music.

We invite you to follow along with your own journaling practice!

1. Choose your favorite psalm, or a psalm you find particularly meaningful. Read the psalm all the way through twice, once silently, and once aloud. 
2. Choose two lines that are parallel* to one another. In your journal, write down these two lines, marking with the same color or formatting (or in some other way) the parallel words in the two lines. Reflect and record in your journal: what makes these words parallel? Are they synonyms? Deliberate contrasts? The completion of a larger image, analogy, or metaphor? 
3. From within the psalm, choose a word, phrase, line, or couplet (pair of lines) that in your view best expresses the feeling of the whole psalm. Write the word, phrase, line, or couplet in your journal. This could serve as an antiphon for the psalm–that is, a thematic refrain to be repeated at the beginning and end when the psalm is prayed aloud.
4. Now write an antiphon of your own in your journal that expresses in your own words something you found meaningful in the psalm.
5. Choose and write down a sound/instrument** that you think would help express each of the two antiphons you developed more fully.
6. How do your two antiphons express similar or different lenses on the text of the psalm you chose?

*The literary technique used in Hebrew poetry is called parallelism (they don’t have rhyme schemes or syllable rhythms like European poetry). In parallelism, the poem generally proceeds in sets of two (sometimes three) lines, where the same idea is expressed in one line and then echoed in the second.

Sometimes the lines are synonymous – the same with substituted synonyms (as in Psalm 88:14: “O Lord, why do you cast me off? / Why do you hide your face from me?”). Sometimes they use a negative contrast to emphasize the idea, as in Psalm 51:10-11 (“put a new and right spirit within me …. do not take your holy spirit from me”). Sometimes the second line completes or deepens (elaborates or explains) the idea of the first, as Psalm 51:5 (“Indeed, I was born guilty / a sinner when my mother conceived me”). This device helps give the Psalms their emotional power.

** If this doesn’t come right away, that’s ok – it might just be a new skill that needs a bit more prompting. If nothing is coming to mind, take about two minutes to read through your antiphon in divergent styles (slow, fast, whispered, yelled, sung, with attitude, without emotion, etc.). The point is to get your heart rate up, breath moving and blood pumping a bit. This bodily activation will often open you up to hearing a sound. This sound can manifest as literally anything and it will likely emerge as a “still small voice” ( (it could be a sound from ordinary life or the type of sound a particular instrument makes). It’s ok (and actually good) if the sound is ridiculous, preposterous, offensive, etc. – most importantly though, if this happens, don’t judge the sound, just note it in your journal and continue.