Hymns, The Psalms and International Identification

A few nights ago, I found myself coming home from work and singing a song that was originally penned by William Cowper called, "God Moves in a Mysterious Way." As I processed the lyrics in my mind and reflected on how much this song has meant to me in times of despair, I couldn't but help think of my Christian brothers and sisters who are abroad. Many of them facing persecution at the moment I am driving home and some of them likely starving to death. As I pondered the lyrics of the song, I could only imagine how much a song like this might mean to my brothers and sisters abroad and in that moment as I walked through the brisk Denver air, a part of me felt like I identified with them in their pain. My soul grimmaced at their persecution, hunger, sickness and suffering.
In regard to both this emotion and practice, I found considerable gudiance from William Dryness, who ultimately rests his own thoughts on the shoulders of Bonhoeffer. In his essay Diversity in Mission and Theology, Dryness forges whate he calls a theology of access. It is through Christ that we have access to the experiences of our brothers and sisters even though we may not partake of them directly. In one paragraph Dryness writes:

For most of my life, many of the psalms have seemed foreign to me. The experiences related in them have seemed alien to me. So I have focused on those that best reflect my own experience with God. But in hearing Bonhoeffers' elaboration of Paul's theology of access, I have to coem to realize, with a start, that these other experience--of grief, loneliess, persecution, thirst, hunger--are not foreign to many of my brothers and sisters in Christ around the world. Believers, in the Sudan, Colombia, Kosovo and Timor are praying these other Psalms, and as I read them, I pray their prayers, even as they pray mine.

It is in the Psalms, that we are able to echo the cries of God's people abroad. We have access to their suffering and the emotions that they are feeling. Through this the Psalms (and hymns in my estimation) become lively. They are no longer static emotions from a distant historical event but they are in fact the present cries of our brothers and sisters. In Life Together Bonhoeffer writes:

A psalm, we cannot utter as a prayer, that makes us falter and horrifies us, is a hint to us that there Someone else is praying, not we; that the One who is protesting his innocence, who is invoking God's judgemnt, who has come to such infinite depths of suffering, in none other than Jesus Christ himself. He is is who is praying here, and not only here but in the whole Psalter.

At the center of Bonhoeffer's understanding of the Gospel was that his access to God through Christ, implies an access to others whom Christ died for. We all partake of the same gospel, atoned for by the same savior and will one day share at the same banquet table. But there is some degree to which we "share" now. We share in one anothers pain because we share in a common Savior.
It is with this theology of access that we should pray the Psalms where we can't readily identify with the emotions. Pray the Psalms you can't understand on behalf of your brothers and sisters around the world. These Psalms and emotions are accessible because we share a common savior, not because we necessarily personally identify with the emotions.