Michael CASEY, The Longest Psalm: Day-by-Day Responses to Divine Self-Revelation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2023. ix + 311 pages, pkb, $29.95. ISBN 979-8-4008-0000-9. Reviewed by Thomas SIMMONS, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, South Dakota 57069.

With its 176 verses, Psalm 119 represents the lengthiest and one of the least esteemed of the psalms. Not only windy, its 176 verses get repetitive, praising Israel’s law – its instructions, its words, its utterances, its commandments, its judgments, its statutes, its precepts (you get the idea) – its Torah – over and over again. It can be tiresome. Leopold Sabourin, in The Psalms: Their Origin and Meaning, calls Psalm 119 tedious and uninspired.

But Fr. Casey, the prolific Australian Cistercian monk, places Psalm 119 in a new light. In his mature, deeply learned, and patient way, he reconceives Psalm 119 as a “creative wandering” which, while offering “but a single theme” formulates “176 different ways of celebrating the life-enhancing role of God’s self-revelation” (308). Casey’s marvelously quiet, contemplative new book reveals a fruitful wandering. Casey shows how the repetitive song to the law of Moses can facilitate holiness in daily life. Carefully. One verse at a time.

Early on, Casey confronts one possible stumbling block to Psalm 119’s secrets. In his dense but readable twelve-page introduction, he acknowledges that law has a “harsh and coercive sense” (3). In addition to the Decalogue, “some 613 additional regulations … were distinguished in the sacred text” (5). A micromanaging  technicality is not what the law represents, Casey stresses. The law of the Old Testament is less a set of technical obligations than God’s self-revelation. Still, Casey also plumbs the idea of law as commandments: “The body of commandments is something to be gazed on as a source of delight and joy. They are a pathway to love from which we may not hide or stray” (8).

“The psalm challenges, but it also comforts and consoles” (6), he explains. Through repeated readings spread over time, the sacred text emerges as an expression of mercy and prayer. It is imbued with celebration and joy.

The Longest Psalm is divided into 176 chapters, one for each verse. Each chapter is captioned as a theme from the verse under consideration. Take, for example, the couplet of verse 167
My soul keeps your testimonies
and loves them very much.

Casey captions the chapter for this verse “Compliance.” While compliance suggests submission and constraint, the psalmist, Casey explains, highlights his response to the Father’s divine revelation as one of love. The psalmist’s response is not one of obligation in expectation of reward. It is one of thanksgiving.

“When love is the motivation, obeying the divine precepts is an act with deep inner resonances that may be far weightier than the external action” (293). Meaningful living flows from cherishing God’s words. “To operate within the context of God’s self-revelation brings with it a sense of harmony with the universe” (ibid.).

The Longest Psalm is tailor-made for daily devotions with its rich, terse, chapters. But it is also – like Psalm 119 itself – a jewel which revels itself with repetition, contemplation, and prayer. It is a jewel deserving of wide and heedful readership.