I walked into the Episcopal Church on Christmas Eve in 2006.[1] The liturgy and the sanctuary were beautiful, but something in the course of the service threw me out of a prayerful space. I had just finished a semester of work on holy war, so the idea of divine violence was fresh in my mind; and the psalm appointed for the service was one in which the death of enemies by fire or by the sword was mentioned. It took a few minutes to re-enter a prayerful space. I wondered about the appropriateness of the psalm to the occasion.[2]
When one prays with scripture, or reads the scripture prayerfully, can we do it to God’s glory with these verses? Is, say, infanticide (let’s not mince words here) something holy by virtue of being in scripture (see below discussion of Ps. 137)? Isn’t it a bit cruel in worship to make someone, who claims no hate for anyone, read/pray “I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies (Ps. 139:22)?” How are such sentiments even honest to Jewish or Christian theology, which counsels love in the face of hate?
I’ve gotten to the point where I can read the most objectionable stuff in the Bible with little difficulty. But it took time and study. Still, the objectionable stuff makes me pause because its own nature and because of my sensitivity to others who are not where I am in my thinking.
Well, how did I get (somewhat) comfortable with this material? I don’t seem to be a monster (though I recognize some very dark parts in my own soul and psyche). My journey to an uneasy comfort with the material mirror’s C.S. Lewis’ own journey; in fact I was partly shaped by it. So I offer my story along with Lewis’ own reflections, which takes one through seeing scripture as a full expression of humanity and placing ourselves in the text. I will also model a form of Bible Study, in which one puts oneself in the place of biblical characters.
If we still believe that all Holy Scripture is “written for our learning” or that the age-old use of the Psalms in Christian worship was not entirely contrary to the will of God, and if we remember that Our Lord’s mind and language were clearly steeped in the Psalter, we shall prefer, if possible, to make some use of them…At the outset I felt sure, and I feel still sure, that we must not either try to explain [the objectionable material] away or yield for one moment to the idea that, because it comes in the Bible, all this vindictive hatred must somehow be good and pious. We must face both facts squarely. The hatred is there—festering, gloating, undisguised—and also we should be wicked if we in any way condoned or approved it, or (worse still) used it to justify similar passions in ourselves. Only after these two admissions have been made can we safely proceed.[3]
I think Lewis is absolutely correct here: The Bible, which is for our instruction, contains terrible and monstrous things that we must name as such (slavery, sexism, racism, infanticide, and genocide, to name a few). And we must not allow these things to appeal to us or approve the monstrosities of which we are capable.
If the above statement about the Bible seems harsh or below the dignity of the text, then let’s take another example from the Bible.
Psalm 137, a deeply moving lament and probably the best known of the most graphic psalms, states that “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones (137:9).”[4] Those are already strong words, but let us take it a step further and get the picture in our minds. “May God reward the one, bestow prosperity and happiness on him, who tears Babylonian babies from their mothers and beats their brains out on the pavement! May that person never look back upon his deed with regret and guilt, but congratulate himself for having done the right thing and having been blessed by God for it.”[5] Can you put yourself in the place of the mother, as a man wrests her screaming child by the legs and swings the child to the ground? Can you hear the crack of the skull? Then, the silence of the child and the wailing of the mother?
This is Psalm 137. Infanticide isn’t the whole story (which I’ll return to), but it is the climax.
The Bible contains many such verses and stories that one can shy away from until one does the hard work of facing the passages’ gruesomeness with all of his or her imagination and senses. It is also a very faithful way to read the Bible, because if one wants to theologize and allegorize these gruesome parts, it is still needful to know what the author literally means. (And I think the Psalmist responsible for 137 was indeed being literal.)
So, once again, the Bible, which is for our instruction, contains terrible and monstrous things that we must name as such, and we must not allow these things to appeal to us or approve the monstrosities of which we are capable.
I add here my own sense of scripture. Scripture is indeed a window through which we can catch glimpses of the Divine and find all things necessary for salvation. But, like all other writing by humans who tried through inspiration to capture something of the unlimited God in the limited world, we “see through a glass, darkly (1Cor13:12)." Scripture, like all human writing, is not just a window to God, but a mirror. We see ourselves in the text too. What becomes distorted is when we look for God through the window, and misrecognize ourselves as God through the mirror. This turns dangerous when we read human pettiness and hatred as divinely inspired, and seek an outlet for that hatred by attacking others.
Also, the psalms are songs, not systematic theologies. They can still tell us something about God, but they tell us much more about the authors and their experience of the world. To build an entire picture of God out of the Psalms (or the Bible) is a mistake of genre. (Remember, the Word of God in its closest-to-perfect form was when the Word took flesh (Jn1:1ff.) But the psalms are a great place to learn about humanity.
This brings us to some uses for the psalms: In them we meet ourselves and the rest of humanity. In them, the range of human emotion is displayed and explored. Consider the laments of Psalms 13, 86, 130 and the celebrations of 126 and 147 as expressions of the height and depths to which the soul can reach. If a god could not reach us or be found in these places of the soul or body, what good is that God?
It may be an uncomfortable truth that some of us meet ourselves in the psalms. At least, this is an uncomfortable truth for me. As one who battles exasperation, impatience, doubt, and anger under multiple levels of apparent calm, the angrier psalms remind me of what I am capable of and where I have let myself go occasionally (in thought and act). The psalms do not warrant or legitimate the worst in me, but remind me that that these feelings are still present in me. And the psalms remind me that my feelings do not conform to the grace of God that I know and experience, and that God will meet me in my basest thoughts to raise me up.
Lewis also mentions another use for the psalms:
It seemed to me that, seeing [in the psalms] hatred undisguised, I saw also the natural result of injuring a human being. The word natural is important here. This result can be obliterated by grace, suppressed by prudence or social convention, and (which is dangerous) wholly disquised by self-deception. But just as the natural result of throwing a lighted match into a pile of shavings is to produce a fire—though damp or the intervention of some more sensible person may prevent it—so the natural result of cheating a man, of ‘keeping him down,’ or neglecting him, is to arouse resentment; that is, to impose upon him the temptation of becoming what the Psalmists were when they wrote the vindictive passages. He may succeed in resisting the temptation; or he may not. If he fails, if he dies spiritually because of his hatred for me, how do I, who provoked that hatred, stand? For in addition to the original injury I have done him a far worse one. I have introduced into his inner life at best a new temptation, at worst a new besetting sin. If that sin utterly corrupts him, I have in a sense debauched or seduced him. I was the tempter.[6]
We occasionally wrong other people. If Lewis is right, the psalms, by showing the range of human emotion, confront us with the results of actions we all do to one another. What will we do then? Will our friends, loved ones, and neighbors be able to read, “yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me (Ps. 41:9),” and see us in their reading of it?
This line of reasoning led Lewis to write that it may be incorrect to then read “the cursings in the Psalms with no feeling except one of horror at the uncharity of the poets. They are indeed devilish. But we must also think of those who made them so. Their hatreds are a reaction to something.”[7]
Let’s then return to Ps. 137.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”
How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones (KJV).
Now, like putting yourself in the position of the mother of the child the psalmist wants killed, put yourself in the position of the psalmist. Jerusalem has fallen, and warfare in the ancient days (or today) was not polite. The psalmist may have watched his city destroyed in flames and looted, women raped and children killed, others enslaved. The enslavers then laugh at the newly enslaved, saying “sing to us!” War and captivity frame this psalm. Is the anger and rage of the psalmist, in the face of the destruction of Jerusalem and the enslaving of his people, at least understandable even if the desire for infanticide is not of God? I tend to think so.
The Bible, which is for our instruction, contains terrible and monstrous things that we must name as such, and we must not allow these things to appeal to us or approve the monstrosities of which we are capable. But it is important for us not to shy away from these things either, particularly the psalms. They are a source for theology, but more than that, they are a source for anthropology, sociology, and psychology. If it is important for us to know ourselves in seeking to understand our relationship to God and our neighbor, the psalms serve us well.
But we also know from our theology and relationship to a God who loves Creation that there is a better expression of relationship to which we are called. We find those in the psalms too, and in the rest of scripture.
So when we pray the psalms, we pray for humanity, and give voice to the full range of human expression even when we do not feel the same way. The chances are good that in praying the psalms, even the troubling ones, we are actually praying with the words someone else would wish to use, and so is in need of our prayers. The practice of praying the psalms continually reminds us of what we are capable of feeling, and what others experience. By the grace of God, may we find in the psalms’ examples which moves us closer to God by emulating God’s love and avoiding the impulses which destroy ourselves and others.
[1] Up until then, I had left and re-found Christianity, but I wasn’t looking for a community. Yet, Christmas Eve would be the visit that would put me on the path to confirmation and perhaps ordination. The church was also where I was wedded to Laura. I rediscovered the importance of community to authentic expressions of the Christian faith.
[2] Also, shortly after the election of Obama, some conservatives began praying for at least the impeachment of Obama, some prayed (or pray) for his death. Psalm 109:8 became a catchphrase for them: “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.” Personally, I felt this was inappropriate, because when one puts the verse in context, what follows is this:
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour.
Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.
Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth. (Ps. 109:9-15, KJV)
The use of this psalm seemed to me to be a good example of using God’s word to revel in one’s own hate and bloodlust.
[3] C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), 22.
[4] Personally, the most moving rendition of this psalm, which captures the heartbreak of an entire people, is Don’s McLean’s rendition of the first verse. The singing of that verse in a round echoes the lament of a nation by enacting it through voice.
[6] Reflections, 24.
[7] Reflections, 25
