I have been re-reading "The Cloister Walk," by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, New York, 1996) which I first read in the late 1990's.  She is a poet by profession, married,  and a protestant believer.  Yet, she became a Benedictine oblate, not becoming "Catholic" as it were, but rather taking those vows as a means of rekindling the embers of her faith.  I believe it worked.  The book is essentially excerpt/edits from her journal she kept during her time at the Benedictine monastery.  Here is a selection (pg. 93) that struck me while reading the chapter entitled, "The Paradox of the Psalms."

"I became aware of three paradoxes in the psalms: that in them pain is indeed 'missed - in Praise' (ed. from Emily Dickinson), but in a way that takes pain fully into account; that though of all the books of the Bible the psalms speak most directly to the individual, they cannot be removed from a communal context;  and that the psalms are holistic in insisting that the mundane and the holy are inextricably linked.  The Benedictine method of reading psalms, with long silences between them rather than commentary or explanation, takes full advantage of these paradoxes, offering almost alarming room for interpretation and response.  It allows the psalms their full poetic power, their use of imagery and hyperbole ("Awake, my soul,/ awake lyre and harp,/ I will awake the dawn [Ps. 57:8]), repetition and contradiction, as tools of word-play as well as the play of human emotions.  For all their discipline, the Benedictines allowed me to relax and sing again in church; they allowed me, as one older sister, a widow with ten children, described it, to "let the words of the psalms wash over me, and experience the joy of just being with words."  As a poet I like to be with words.  It was a revelation to me that this could be prayer; that this could be enough."

Rod