Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on the Psalms as Poems)

“The psalms are poems, and poems intended to be sung: not doctrinal treatises, not even sermons. Those who talk of reading the Bible ‘as literature’ sometimes mean, I think, reading it without attending to the main thing it is about; like reading Burke with no interest in politics, or reading the Aeneid with no interest in Rome. That seems to me to be nonsense. But there is a saner sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are. Most emphatically the Psalms must be read as poems; as lyrics, with all the licenses and all the formalities, the hyperboles, the emotional rather than logical connections, which are proper to lyric poetry. They must be read as poems if they are to be understood . . . Otherwise we will miss what is in them and think we see what is not.”— English novelist, academic, and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Reflections on the Psalms (1958)