This was the psalm I had found myself quoting in conversation that prompted the decision to pray through some of the psalms – verse 4 “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?” I know we are not actually on foreign land, but it kinda feels like it with everything uprooted and changed and off-limits.
But it wasn’t verse 4 that hit me this morning. Instead, it was it was the realisation that in the psalm it is the enemies who ask for the people to sing a song, who “called for mirth”. Yet I think in our society we internalise that, and apply the pressure to ourselves. Find something positive. Be grateful. And I am not knocking either of those things – they can be helpful. But we need to also tell truth. It’s like forgiveness – we can only forgive once we have acknowledged something was done wrong. We have to tell the truth about what happened, for ourselves as much as for anyone else. There’s an old gospel song used in the civil rights movement in the US “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize”, which says:
“The only thing we did was wrong was stayin’ in the wilderness too long… The only thing we did was right was the day we started to fight…”
Yeah. We need to tell the truth or we risk settling for how things are currently and not changing anything. That applies to the pandemic, to racism and violence, to our most intimate relationships… all of it. Hard. But necessary.
(And a brief note about the ending – where the psalmist says “Happy shall be the one who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock.” Ouch. I like to think I don’t wish such dreadful things on anyone. But it occurs to me this morning that I regularly wish for terrible things to happen to the people who mouth off the most obvious awful cliches… so they can experience and know what is so harmful about the stuff they say. It would be for their own good! But I still wish for awful things to happen. Hmmm….)
stbedeschapel 