Mind wanders during mass? You need something to keep you on track? Have you tried Psalms?

You can use The Psalms, New Catholic version, St. Joseph edition (Catholic Book Publishing, 2004). If that be a sales pitch, so be it.

Tell you how I use it. Say the presider of the day is off his game. Not up to his usual top-notch clarity of sound, correctness of pronunciation, accuracy of emphasis, all-’round perspicacity, has become something of a distraction. Not coming through in the way we like, not cutting the mustard from the stage, I mean altar table, from which he presides.

Suppose all of it. What to do? Worshiper wants to stay abreast, does he not? He has delivered the body and wants the whole experience, more important — much more — he owes his full attention as far as possible to what’s happening and does not want to wake up after five or ten minutes of God knows what, having to pull himself together.

No. What he wants, what he needs, is a counter-distraction, which is where Psalms come in. This book is not the only counter-distraction device — prime among others being the Rosary, of course — but it’s a very good vehicle for holy thinking to accompany, not to blot out, the super-holy activity of the moment.

It can be done. You take in the one without blotting out the other and away you go. Try it, you’ll like it.

Case in point

Consider beginning at the start of the God-blessed book. I have done so, to good effect.

The first Psalm, short and to the point, asks what kind of man is blessed and answers, one who “does not guide his steps by ill counsel, or turn aside where sinners walk, or, where scornful souls gather.”

Stay away from know-it-all wiseguys.

Instead be truly wise, one “whose heart is set day and night on the law of the Lord.”

Keep God in mind.

This good guy “stands firm as a tree planted by running water, ready to yield its fruit when the season comes, not a leaf faded; all that he does will prosper.”

Let’s hear it, fellows and gals.

Their counterpart? “the wicked,” who “like chaff the wind sweeps away.”

Fly-by-nights . . .

. . . who “when judgement comes, to rise and plead their cause . . . will have no [role] in the reunion of the just.”

The just, en contraire, “walk . . . under the Lord’s protection.”

The wicked? They are “soon lost to sight!”

It’s the psalmist’s world, carrying a heap of — God bless us all — rock-bottom, heart-of-the-matter doctrine.

See this book of poetry as 150 stirring units — poems or chapters if you please — with a philosophy and more than that, a series of instructions on how to live.

Unparallelled in the Judaeo-Christian heritage.

Now, for unadulterated reading, here’s this first Psalm in its Knox translation.

1 Blessed is the man who does not guide his steps by ill counsel, or turn aside where sinners walk, or, where scornful souls gather, sit down to rest;

2 the man whose heart is set on the law of the Lord, on that law, day and night, his thoughts still dwell.

3 He stands firm as a tree planted by running water, ready to yield its fruit when the season comes, not a leaf faded; all that he does will prosper.

4 Not such, not such the wicked; the wicked are like chaff the wind sweeps away.

5 Not for the wicked, when judgement comes, to rise up and plead their cause; sinners will have no part in the reunion of the just.

6 They walk, the just, under the Lord’s protection; the path of the wicked, how soon is it lost to sight!

I love the cadence, the richness of its figures. 150 of them, as it happens, such a gift from our Judaeo-Christian tradition.