Benedictine Sister Rose Mary Rexing

Sister Rose Mary Rexing first told listeners how she dearly loves the psalms, because they are stories from the heart, and because they are so intertwined with every emotion.

And she then became emotional herself as she told a personal story that tugged at the heartstrings of the people attending her program, “Psalms: Prayers of the Heart,” at Kordes Center in Ferdinand.

When teaching high school religion in Ferdinand long ago, Sister Rose Mary told her students to pick out a psalm and to rewrite it in their own words.

“One student, Pat Mehling, found Psalm 117, which had only two verses,” she said, laughing. Pat contracted cancer later that year. As he awaited death, Sister Rose Mary visited him in the hospital. “His spirit was just great. I asked how he kept his spirits so strong, how could he deal with this? He told me to open a nearby drawer. I did, and there was the psalm.”

Pat died that year, in 1983, at age 17. “I never pray this psalm without thinking of Pat,” said Sister Rose Mary, her voice breaking. “So you never know how the psalms are going to touch somebody’s life.”

She tightly clutches the book she’s holding. “This Bible is always so holy for me. I think of all the lives and stories. God works through it all. People pray these words to God, they help us express all those emotions within us, and how we talk to God, and how we listen.”

Another special psalm for Sister Rose Mary says simply, “Look to God and be radiant.” A lover of images, she made a soul collage that portrays that psalm, of looking to God and being radiant. She keeps the collage in her private prayer spot, periodically looking at it to dwell in what God is calling her to be.

She spoke of praying the psalms repeatedly with the sisters for the Liturgy of the Hours, and how sometimes a familiar sentence will suddenly jump off the page, slap her in the face, and say, “Pay attention, Rose Mary!” She struggled for years with the meaning of one such phrase, “Sing a new song to the Lord,” until an answer finally appeared to her this year. It came in the often-sung servant psalm, when she realized she was the new song, in her role as the Lord’s servant. The revelation literally moved her to tears.

“Sometimes the psalms can be in our interior for a long time before we know what God is calling us to do,” she said. She reminded the audience “what a treasure we have in the psalms.” And she encouraged them to let God talk to them, through the psalms, and to use them for guidance, comfort and love.

At the end of the program, like she did with her high school religion class years ago, Sister Rose Mary asked the participants to pick a psalm that speaks to their heart and to put it into their own words.

One attendee chose Psalm 63 because it speaks of “comfort and assurance in God’s presence.” She said, “God’s love and strength is really all I need.”

Pat Mehling would have been proud.