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CAROL LOLLIS

Ellen Augarten, left, and the Rev. Andrea Ayvazian teamed up to get 150 people to rewrite 150 psalms in their own words for a new book, “Psalms in Ordinary Voices.” Ayvazian says that for the many writers, the project meant “taking a risk and a leap of faith. I’m very touched by that.”

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Pauline Bassett and lan katz

“When I am troubled and feel lost and alone, I look to the sky, seeking help.”

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Patricia Romney

“We salute you. We praise you. We glorify you. We thank you.”

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Jim Moynihan

“Happy and blessed are those who believe and act with kindness; they believe and live in the Lord’s peace.”

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Marion Van Arsdell

“God is there in the midst of the city and will protect and sustain that place.”

When Marion Van Arsdell of Florence was asked if she'd like to be part of a book project about the 150 psalms of the Bible, she remembers being "kind of intrigued by the challenge."

The idea - which had originated with the Rev. Andrea Ayvazian, now pastor of the Haydenville Congregational Church - was to update the ancient psalms by asking 150 people to each take one and rewrite it in their own way, in their own words.

Van Arsdell, 68, a longtime member of the First Churches of Northampton, said yes.

"And then," she said, "I wondered why I had."

Struggling with it

As she read and re-read Psalm 46, the one she had been asked to take on, Van Arsdell wondered how she could improve on the "very rich" old language or mine that language for new meanings.

Van Arsdell then did what almost any good writer would have done. She procrastinated. And then "I struggled with it" over several sittings, she said.

She wrote, finding words that drew on the verses written thousands of years ago. Though Van Arsdell wrote her version years ago, both her version and the original it was drawn from reflect realities that remain as contemporary as today's news from Japan:

"God is our comfort and our support, beside us/ when we are most in need.

"So we will not be afraid even when the world is/filled with change and insecurity.

"Even though the very waters of the earth are/ troubled and earthquakes shake the mountain.

"There is a river steady and calm that carries the/ promise of peace to God's city, a holy place.

"God is there in the midst of the city and will protect and sustain that place. ..."

God's family

Van Arsdell's words, along with a photo of her taken by photographer Ellen Augarten of Northampton, are now part of a new book: "Psalms in Ordinary Voices," published by White River Press of Amherst. The text is edited by Ayvazian, 59; each writer was photographed by Ellen Augarten, 60, also of Northampton.

The now-finished project, from idea to printing press, was nearly 10 years in the making owing primarily to the fact that Ayvazian and Augarten fit it in when they could as part of their already busy work lives.

Nearly all of the 150 people who contributed to the project live in western Massachusetts. Among them are people from all walks of life - school bus drivers, pastors, attorneys, custodians, inmates, teachers, groundskeepers. They are people of all races, women and men, old and young, gay and straight and transgendered, believers and non-believers, disabled and others who are not physically challenged.

"It was very important to me from day one that the book should look like the world, like all God's people, like God's family," said Ayvazian in an interview earlier this week. "That was a fundamental value of the book."

Though the psalms have been reinterpreted and re-written before - there's even a haiku collection - most previous efforts are the work of a single writer, Ayvazian said. "But by a diverse cross-section of people, no. We don't think there's any other book like it."

As reached out to find prospective writers, Ayvazian started with her own large community of friends, friends of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances and worked from there. How did she do it? "I picked up the phone," she says in her characteristically down to earth manner. She drew no bright line between those she contacted who were members of a faith community and those who weren't.

"I didn't say, who are my most religious friends? I assume that we are all spiritual beings," she said. "I believe people are seeking meaning and connection to something larger than themselves, that they all have questions. I believe we are all born with a spark of God within us that is fanned or doused in our lifetimes."

Old treasures

Some of those Ayvazian approached countered with immediate questions. Why do this? And why the psalms?

The psalms are, as Ayvazian aptly puts it, "these remarkable old beautiful treasures" that are still used in different religious traditions. Though scholars have offered varying accounts about their authorship, the psalms are thought to date from early in the history of ancient Israel. They may have been the work of several authors, or groups of authors, scholars say. And, taken together, they express every emotion - they are cries of lament and pain, of hope, of doubt, of joy and of praise. They are pleas for help, for comfort in the face of hardship, for strength against enemies.

The 23rd Psalm, no doubt, is the best known: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. ..." Its eloquence raises the question Ayvazian has been often asked: How could anyone improve on that?

The answer, she said, is that you don't.

"I said to people many times, 'you won't improve on them, you'll do it differently," she said. "We are trying to bring them into contemporary language and see what they mean to you. What relevance does it have to your life?"

Techno savvy kids

The book's origins go back a decade, to when Ayvazian was teaching her son's Sunday school class at First Churches in Northampton. Sasha, now 23, and the rest of the students basically found the Bible "ancient, stale and hard to understand," she recalls. Every week she tried to come up with something to engage "these thoroughly cool, techno savvy kids," she said, to little avail. "They were more interested in the snacks," she said.

One Sunday, Ayvazian's subject was the 23rd psalm and she decided to try something different. She passed out paper and pencils and began reading the psalm aloud, pausing at the end of each sentence. Write down whatever it makes you think about or feel, she told them. When they were done, the students read them aloud to each other.

"They were beautiful," she says, so beautiful that she showed them to the Rev. Peter Ives, then the church's pastor, and to many of the parents and members of the congregation.

People were moved and touched by them, Ayvazian said. At home, she began thinking, maybe this could be a book. She shared them with her partner and Sasha's father, Michael Klare, who encouraged the idea.

The first people who said yes chose the psalm they wanted to write about. "I kept a big yellow pad of names and numbers," she said. As the project grew, and more and more of the psalms were taken, Ayvazian would consult that big yellow pad and say, "well, 16, 28, and 49 are still available ..." And at the end, when there were only a few left, the pitch became more like, "I really need you to do this one."

Jim Moynihan, 59, a plumber by trade who works at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, came to know Ayvazian when she was a chaplain at the college.

"Here's the thing," he said. "When you meet Andrea, she just has this tremendous way of creating community, of creating church in your workplace. She challenges you, she re-energizes people. She approached many of us."

Naturally, Moynihan said, he told Ayvazian all the reasons he couldn't write a psalm. "She listens and says, OK, OK. Thanks for saying yes! Anyway, I was honored and humbled to do it, but I found it very challenging. I told her, I'm really struggling with it," he recalled. "She'd say, oh, that's good, just relax with it. Let it be where you are."

Ayvazian left Mout Holyoke in 2005. "We miss her terribly," Moynihan said.

Something missing

As she began collecting the written psalms, Ayvazian realized something was missing - a visual sense that these were the writings of flesh-and-blood people. Her thoughts quickly turned to Ellen Augarten, a photographer whose work she admired.

"I knew Ellen did absolutely beautiful portraits of people, in natural settings, in natural light," she said. "I thought she was the perfect match."

Augarten came on board in 2003. "Andrea's a hard person to say no to, first of all," Augarten says. "And even though I'm not a person of faith, it just seemed like such a great project."

Over the next few years, Augarten visited each psalm writer at their workplace or home. Time after time, she said, the connection with her subjects just clicked. "I like people to kind of quiet down, relax a little," she said. "I wasn't trying to catch anyone off guard."

Augarten's black-and-white portraits seem to capture people at gentle moments of reflection and introspection.

In her picture, Patricia Romney of Amherst is sitting on a brick wall in her garden at home.

"There's something about those pictures," said Romney, 66. "Many of them were taken outside and they show people in the world, right in God's creation." Romney said the pictures give expression to the ordinariness and the diversity of the writers - and made her think that perhaps "God is looking down on all these ordinary, different, beautiful faces."

Romney's text is based on psalm 118, a message of supplication and thanks. In her version, Romney wrote:

"I suffered and cried out to you my God./ You answered me and widened my path./You gave me courage and opened my heart./ Look at me, my God/ Once rejected and tossed aside. I, your servant, am now made new in You."

On other pages we meet people in pain, or full of doubt.

Stevie Converse, then a student at Mount Holyoke College, begins her version of psalm 77 this way:

"I feel utterly and completely alone./ I cry out./ I cry out a desperate plea for recognition. My hands are outstretched, reaching, waiting. ..."

Midway through his version of Psalm 89, Rich Fournier, a minister who lives in Northampton, writes:

"But truth be told, dear God,/ You confuse me./ I love to tell the story of/ Your power and Your love, and Your promises for our sovereign kingdom and our glorious future. And yet...

"Our present reality cannot be denied./ There's a quaking in my heart and a shaking in my faith/ for we are bereft of Your presence./ We have been deserted, abandoned, and/ delivered to our enemies to be mocked and killed..."

Those who wrote say they hope Ayvazian and Augarten's book will make the psalms accessible to people today. Their hope is that it will be a reminder that these ancient texts are still meaningful, says Pauline Basset of Northampton, and that they continue to yield new meanings today.

Jim Moynihan says that working with his Psalm 2, which was his, sparked his interest in digging deeper by reading many of the others.

Marion Van Arsdell, the retired Northampton teacher who had struggled writing hers, said the experience of grappling with an old text that described God's steadiness in a world of turmoil and destruction, reinforced her faith. "I think my spiritual experience is something that helps me," she said. "We're so lacking in hope in our world at times. My faith helps me stay hopeful."

Suzanne Wilson can be reached at swilson@gazettenet.com.