The only one moral infantcide

In my parish, we follow a 30-day cycle of reading all 150 Psalms. At this Saturday’s Vespers, in honor of our bishop’s visit, our choir will be leading the congregation in singing the Psalms appointed for the 28^th of the month. They happen to include Psalm 137 (Hebrew numbering).

Over the years, I have belonged to several Protestant faith traditions, all devoted to singing portions of Scripture. But we never thought of singing all of Psalm 137 during a church worship service. In fact, at music practice, we Orthodox choir members shot up our eyebrows. “Why are we singing this?”

Why, indeed? Psalm 137 is absolutely no fun. It has no words of praise to the Lord, but of lament and violence.

The original setting for the psalm is one of ancient Babylon’s water ways. Some exiled Israelites musicians of the sixth century B.C. are sprawled, weeping by the bank, and have hung their harps on low-hanging willow trees, too homesick to sing.

A group of Babylonians happen by and torment them, “Sing a song of Zion!”

“How can we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?” they reply.

Yet, they do sing. The song evolves into a devotion to Jerusalem, now lying in ruins. The writer thinks back on how their neighbors, the Edomites, gloated over the disaster. Worse yet, they lurked at escape routes in Jerusalem’s walls, rounded up fugitives, and handed them over to the Babylonians (Obadiah 12-14).

The anger wells up so greatly in the psalmist’s heart that the last of the song is a horrible curse:

Happy the one who takes
and dashes your infants
against the rock! (v. 9)

How in the world do we Christians of the 21^st century handle this? Wouldn’t it be best to discount it as one of those texts of an unenlightened people before the coming of Christ and modern civilization?

The Orthodox Church handles this psalm by boldly incorporating it into her liturgy. This is not because she endorses anything remotely like literal, human infanticide. Rather, she interprets this and other imprecatory psalms in the light of Jesus Christ.

Thus, for followers who take our cue from Jesus to, “Love your enemies,” there remains only one category of enemy that we must actively fight against. This category is the demonic forces of evil (Eph 6:12).

Psalm 137 becomes a lament of our exile in this dark world, as we long for the physical kingdom of God to come. It is an imprecation against our tempter and accuser. With this understanding, St. Benedict revolutionized verse 9 in a most practical way for us today.

“Lord, who shall dwell in your tabernacle?

He who takes the evil spirit that tempts him; . . . who grasps his evil suggestions [in their infancy] and dashes them to pieces on the rock that is Christ.”[1]

[1] The Rule of St. Benedict, Justin McCann, trans., ed., (Ft. Collins, Colo.: Roman Catholic Books), 9-10.

Multi-tasking Booby Prize

On my walk Wednesday morning, I encountered a man who took multitasking to a whole new level.

The guy had put his left arm through the handle of a leash, at which end strained a full grown yellow lab/german shepherd mix. His right arm was also looped through the leash of another full grown yellow lab/german shepherd. He jerked hard at their leashes and ordered them to sit. It was all they could do to comply as the sights and smells of the glorious outdoors bombarded their senses. In his hands he grasped a high-end Nikon complete with zoom lens. He stood at the trail’s edge, attempting to shoot a picture of some bird up in the heavily shadowed trees against a dark gray sky. By the time he could lift the camera to his eye, the bird had flown to another tree, and the dogs were shifting their rumps to start to get to their feet.

Now successful bird watching and picture taking not only requires the right lighting conditions, the birder must also be as quiet and still as possible. However, this man had apparently decided he could beat the odds in spite of having none of this going for him. Heroically, he tried again to take a shot. If by some dumb luck, he finally locked on his bird, it eluded me how he was planning to keep the Nikon steady with two large canines hauling at his coordination.

Neither one of us got a chance to find out.

When the threesome heard my footsteps coming up behind them on the sidewalk, the lab/shepherd nearest me whirled around, growled deeply in his throat, and lunged at me. As the new center of everyone’s interest, I backed away from them and stood still, hoping this guy had a good grasp on his dogs. He yelled harshly at the lunger, jerked its leash hard, and smacked its face with the end.

Then as I continued on my way, he said to me, “Don’t worry, they’re friendly. They’re just a little jumpy this morning.” Hmm. And I’ll bet the man’s pictures will show the same focused care and loving discipline he gives his pets. Yeah, I’ll just bet.

Delusions of Aloneness

Book 5 of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, The Horse and His Boy, tells the tale of a child raised in Calormen, a country far from Narnia. Through a series of adventures, he eventually saves Narnia and its neighbor, Archenland, from Calormen invasion.

This boy, Shasta, has a tough time of it from the get-go. He didn’t know his real father or mother and had been brought up by a fisherman. He ran away when the fisherman then tried to sell him to a nobleman. He and three others who were also escaping circumstances—a girl, Aravis, and two talking horses—were “chased by lions and forced to swim for their lives.” Then they were separated and almost discovered. He had to spend the night alone among the Tombs listening to howling jackals. Once they all met up again, they faced “the heat and thirst of their desert journey, and…they were almost at their goal when another lion chased them and wounded the girl.” Then, after he has risked life and limb to warn King Lune of Archenland of the invasion, what does the king and his hunting party do but race off, leaving Shasta to keep up on a troublesome horse as best as he can. He falls behind until he is on a dark and cold mountain road seemingly traveled by no one else. Naturally, Shasta begins to cry with exhaustion, hunger, and self-pity.

What put a stop to all this [crying] was a sudden fright. Shasta discovered that someone …was walking beside him. It was pitch dark and he could see nothing. And the Thing (or Person) was going so quietly that he could hardly hear any footfalls. What he could hear was breathing. His invisible companion seemed to breathe on a very large scale, and Shasta got the impression that it was a very large creature. And he had come to notice this breathing so gradually that he had really no idea how long it had been there. It was a horrible shock.
“Who are you?” he said, scarcely above a whisper.

“One who has waited long for you to speak,” said the Thing. Its voice was not loud, but very large and deep.

The Thing asked Shasta to tell It his troubles. At the end of his story, It said, “I do not call you unfortunate.”

“Don’t you think it was bad luck to meet so many lions?” said Shasta.

“There was only one lion,” said the Voice.

“What on earth do you mean? I’ve just told you there were at least two the first night, and—”

“There was only one: but he was swift of foot.”

“How do you know?”

“I was the lion. I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drive the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat…to receive you.”

“Who are you?” asked Shasta.

“Myself,” said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again “Myself,” loud and clear and gay; and then the third time “Myself,” whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it…

The mist was turning from black to grey and from grey to white… A golden light fell on them from the left. He thought it was the sun. He turned and saw, pacing beside him, taller than the horse, a Lion…No one ever saw anything more terrible or beautiful.

After one glance at the Lion’s face he slipped out of the saddle and fell at its feet. The High King above all kings stooped towards him … It touched his forehead with its tongue. Shasta lifted his face and their eyes met.

Put your finger to your pulse; is your heart still beating? Get up and go to a window; is the world still there? Let that awareness reset your sense of reality. Sometimes the Presence of God’s Spirit is a severe mercy. It exudes silent and unseen Grace, revealed only in retrospect. Total aloneness is a delusion.