Lent seems to have its own special claim on psalms. From the 6th Century, seven of them were marked out as 'penitential psalms', especially appropriate for Lent. And in the decades after the Reformation, Protestants and Catholics often turned to these psalms for comfort and to voice their own confessions, writing poems and reflections. John Milton, for example, paraphrased Psalm 6 during the English Revolution, as his high hopes for the English Commonwealth began to crumble. In the tense early days of the Catholic Reformation, Orlando Lassus set all seven penitential psalms to music, but Allegri's setting of Psalm 51, Miserere Mei, is perhaps the most famous of all. These poets and musicians, like so many before and after, found in these psalms a way of asking God for mercy and for help, in a world that so often seemed dark and cruel.

For the psalms remind us that we are never alone, that we share in a tradition that stretches through time and space. Each of us will say and hear them differently, yet in the common reciting of them there is solidarity and comfort. In our troubled times the psalms allow us too to lament and to protest against all that is wrong in our world, and they encourage us towards love and reconciliation in our own lives and for those around us. For, as Psalm 130 puts it, 'with the Lord is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem’.