LET EVERY THING THAT HATH BREATH
Roman Catholic monks of the Order of Saint Benedict singing Vespers on Holy Saturday at St. Mary's Abbey in Morristown, New Jersey. Photo by John Stephen Dwyer, used under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
“Pausing at the asterisk.”
The first time I heard those words, I doubt I paid them any attention. Until the pause came. One second. Two. Three. “How long—,” I probably wondered, until we were suddenly back to the second half of the verse. And then again, and again, and again.
I tried counting to see if that made this novel pattern seem more predictable. No luck. Some people went quickly, like kids getting ready to dive back under water to see who could hold their breath the longest. Others took their sweet time, as if the world stood still while the congregation counted along, “One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi, Four Mississippi, Five Mississippi.”
Later on, I learned that the pauses flow from monastic practice. Judging by the cavernous silences that punctuate the recitation of the psalms at various abbeys, the answer to “How long?” might as well be, “As long as it takes for God to speak.”
In practice, the pauses are just what they seem: breath marks for monks and nuns, young and elderly alike, doing their best to carry out the opus Dei of reciting the offices for hours a day, day in and day out. At them, one expels what breath remains and inhales fully, without hyperventilation or pretense, consciously and deliberately.
But as far as breath marks go, none seems quite so on point as the one at the very end of the psalms, at Ps. 150:6: “Let every thing that hath breath * praise the Lord.”
Recite it yourself. “Let every thing that hath breath”—breathe out entirely, and then breathe in slowly and fully—“praise the Lord.”
The bad news: the breath mark isn’t there in the Latin, and for good reason. The Latin Vulgate differs from the Hebrew Masoretic Text; the breath mark there comes before the last half-verse: “omnis spiritus laudet Dóminum”—“let every spirit praise the Lord.” Using Jerome’s Vulgate, monks and nuns couldn’t regularly pause meaningfully and knowingly at that precise point and marvel at the connection between the verse and the breath mark.
But now the good news: we can. Reading ourselves into the text? Perhaps. But not in a way that isn’t true. Throughout the Lauds, Psalms 148 to 150, we sing about how all creation praises God, from the angels to the hills, from the elders to the saints. We find ourselves, too, in those verses, sometimes less specifically—“Kings of the earth and all people”—and sometimes more so—“Young men and maidens, old men and children, praise the Name of the Lord.”
But it isn’t until we reach the end, the very end, that we have such an explicit chance to reflect on our own participation in this ancient song of praise. To pause to breathe after reciting “Let every thing that hath breath” is as powerful a reminder as we will ever get that we are among those who have breath. And while we live—while we still have breath—we can yet “praise the Lord.”
Indeed, that pause has newfound resonance as we hear the cry of those who cannot breathe, a cry that reminds us that life is so utterly fragile and fleeting: “when the breath of man goeth forth he shall turn again to his earth * and then all his thoughts perish.” But we’d be mistaken if we confused the frailty of human life for a measure of its value, of our value. For “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” If by our breath we set forth God’s praise, what do we mean to tell God by cutting short others’ without just cause?
All the same, it’s fitting that this verse ends the psalms, that special treasury of praises to God, with one last breath praising the God of all. Would that our lives as Christians could match the psalter in that respect—made new with the blessedness that God alone can give and ending with the praises of that God on our lips.
Let every thing that hath breath *
praise the Lord.
