On the thirty-first day of the month, at Evensong

It is ordered, that the same Psalms shall be read the day of the said months [i.e. those months with thirty-one days] which were read the day before - The Order How the Psalter is Appointed to be Read, 1662.

Of all the disciplines and practices of the classical Prayer Book tradition, I find the most spiritually and emotionally significant to be the monthly reading of the Psalter.  Contemporary Anglican daily office lectionaries - often either reading the Psalter a mere four times a year, or replacing its ordered, monthly reading with thematic Psalms - losing the rich gift of, month by month, having our prayer shaped and sustained by the Psalms of Israel, the Psalms of Jesus Christ, the Psalms of the Church.

As the years go by, the rhythms of the monthly reading of the Psalter become part of our prayer at Mattins and Evensong.

There is the fact that each month begins with the words of Psalm 1, itself offering an description of the richness of the Psalter:

And he shall be like a tree planted by the waterside: that will bring forth his fruit in due season.

As Hooker puts it, the Psalter is "one celestial fountain" (LEP V.37.2).

Then on the fourth day of the month at Evensong there is Psalm 22, the psalm of the Passion, which is read with Psalm 23, uniting our experience of mortality - "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death" - with the Lord's saving Passion.  In the midst of the month, on the fifteenth day at Evensong, we have the seventy-three long verses of Psalm 78, drawing our story into the story of Israel, of vocation, sin, failure, and exile, but ending as our stories end, with the faithfulness of God.  On the twenty-fourth day of the month at Mattins, we begin to read Psalm 119, rooting us month by month in joyful meditation on the goodness of God's self-revelation, "sweeter than honey unto my mouth".

Then we reach Evensong on the thirtieth day of the month and Psalms 147-150, repeated again on those months with thirty-one days.  As the months pass, whatever the circumstances of our life, we are brought again and again to these psalms of praise.  Our monthly reading of the Psalter ends with the words "praise the Lord". How else could it end, but in praise? For our creation and our redemption.  For grace abounding. And in anticipation of the beatific vision which will be ours at the end, when we will be forever praising. 

Of course, it is not quite correct that the monthly reading of the Psalter ends with "praise the Lord", for other words always follow:

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

As Hooker says of this "hymn of glory, our usual conclusion to psalms":

the glory of all things is that wherein their highest perfection doth consist; and the glory of God, that divine excellency, whereby he is eminent above all things, his omnipotent, infinite, and eternal being, which angels and glorified saints do intuitively behold; we on earth apprehend principally by faith ... - V.42.7.

At the conclusion of the Psalms at Evensong on the thirtieth and thirty-first days of the month, this has a particular resonance.  These Psalms are an echo of the praises of the City of God and a foretaste of the beatific vision.  The Gloria Patri recapitulates this.  Now, as another month has passed, as the year moves on, we are reminded of that which "ever shall be: world without end. Amen".