by Tom Magill

The first thing to be said about this beautiful book is that it takes seriously the poetry of the bible. How easy it is to forget that so much of the Scriptures, the Old Testament but also the New, is poetry. And how easy it then becomes to approach the sacred text in a Gradgrind fashion mining it for the ‘facts’ or the ‘right’ doctrine.

Jock Stein, the author of this study of the Psalms, unveils the riches that await us when we read and receive this poetry in a poetic way. In so doing, he shows the role the imagination must play in the life of faith, carrying the reader and listener to unexpected and perhaps undreamed of places. He employs what John Henry Newman calls the illative sense – that ability which allows us to immerse ourselves in the collecting and processing capacity of our unconscious and which shows that the language of the imagination is prior to the literal and conceptual. That great scholar of the Psalms, Luis Alonso-Schokel, once noted: ‘What has been written with imagination must be read with imagination’.

And what imagination Jock Stein shows! He reads the Psalms with his own poetry, displacing them so to speak from their original context and placing them in a Scottish setting, both historical and contemporary. This is an intertextual reading, although Stein does not use that term. Intertextuality unites the language of the text to the reader’s reading and so, in some way, produces a new text. It foregrounds the relationship, interconnectedness, and interdependence between the original text and the contemporary reading, readily seen in the five chapters of the study reflecting the five books of the psalter. His resulting poems are powerful testimony to Stein’s profound acquaintance with and deep reading of the psalms, his engagement with Scottish history and literature and his awareness of the contemporary challenges facing our nation.

Dr Tom Magill is parish priest of St Athanasius, Carluke