What can we sing in a distorted world?
Language and music are taut and strained. How can we compress into a phrase a modern pieta, or a father cradling body parts?
What can we sing?
We stand in the rubble of a distorted world where dust never settles, light filters through, flickering, faulted. Shadows lengthen.
Creation is cloaked by human action, or indifference.
And, again, what can we sing?
Perhaps we should be silent?
It has been said that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. And we turn up on Sunday morning to offer praise and thanksgiving or, expecting a still, small voice, a gentle stroll beside still waters. Have we forgotten? Perhaps. Or are we too young? Since October the seventh our slumbering memories have been re-awakened. And what do we sing? At times like these I wonder at the inability of our Christian churches to lament. Its absence in these times should shock.
I turn to two Psalms, one communal; one individual.
Psalm 137
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
The nearest we get to these words, a reprise of Boney M singing ‘By the rivers of Babylon’. Notice they never use verses 8 and 9:
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!
Like a hybrid car shifting gear they move to something more comfortable: May the words of my lips and the meditation of my heart…’ They want something deemed ‘acceptable’.
Think of the horror of war, images that can’t be broadcast for what they portray. What would we feel? Might we not want vengeance? This Psalm says that such emotions are legitimate, human. How can we admit this in our churches? We need to know that we are still held by God when we have witnessed acts of deepest hatred and want to hit back, to wreak havoc.
But a warning. The Psalmist grasps this yet it can never be a justification for repeating the horror, simplistically, ‘because the Bible tells us so’. An ‘eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ should be consigned to the past.
Psalm 22
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’.
This is personal, now. The cry we hear from the cross, from the lips of Jesus, words of a Psalm uttered in desperation in the throes of death: words just for Good Friday? They are strong enough for a hymn writer to pen: ‘the Father turns His face away’. And sometimes it feels like that. Yet God does not turn away, will not leave us in distress. Nevertheless, we may still feel the reality of personal desolation. If the Psalmist felt this emotion, and Jesus expressed it, then it is common to humanity and not to be condemned. It is cry of wretchedness though not a matter of doubt, rather of supreme faith. That is the foundation lament, a certainty of the presence of God with us in spite of all, even in persecution or impending death. We only complain when our expectations are not met – a train is late, food has gone mouldy, a friend lets us down. In faith we have expectations of God, God with us, always, in every circumstance or situation. Yet sometimes we feel desolate, abandoned, as though God has gone away. And then we too can lament, we can groan from the depths of our being. And at such times we utter the deepest, most sincere prayer we may ever voice, ‘God help me!’ This is no blasphemy, but a heartfelt, visceral cry of need undergirded by a subconscious sense that when all else is absent, there is a name on whom we can call.
So what music, what language, can we borrow, can we use? Perhaps Gorecki’s Third Symphony? Or a hymn like this? – ‘When loneliness oppresses me’ from Hymns of Hope and Healing/Unravelling the Mysteries sung, maybe, to KINGSFOLD?
1 When loneliness oppresses me;
when darkness fills my soul;
when grief and weeping overwhelm
and none can make me whole;
in angry fear I call to you.
When will you hear my cry?
This heavy burden on my heart
must lift, or else I die.
2 When close companions melt away,
afflictions have no end,
I cry for help to empty air,
darkness my only friend.
O God, why have you left me here?
When will my troubles cease?
If you refuse to hear my prayer,
how will I find release?
Hymn - Marjorie Dobson
© Copyright 2012 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, www.stainer.co.uk. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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