The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [46]
O how could we sing
the song of the Lord
on alien soil? (Ps. 137:3-4)
These lines have a special poignancy for women: All too often, for reasons of gender, as well as poverty and race, we find that our journey from girlhood to womanhood is an exile to “alien soil.” And how do feminist women, who often feel as if we’re asked to sing in the midst of an oppressive patriarchy, asked to dress pretty and act nice, read such a psalm? We may feel, as radical feminists do, that the very language we speak is an oppressor’s tongue. How, then, do we sing?
If the psalm doesn’t offer an answer, it allows us to dwell on the question. And as one encounters this psalm over and over again in Benedictine liturgy, it asks us to acknowledge that being uprooted and forced into servitude is not an experience alien to our “civilized” world. The speaker could be one of today’s refugees or exiles, an illegal alien working in an American sweat shop for far less than the minimum wage, a slave laborer in China. When one reads the psalm with this in mind, the closing verse, containing an image of unspeakable violence against Israel’s Babylonian captors, comes as no surprise: “O Babylon, destroyer, / he is happy who repays you the ills you brought on us. / He shall seize and shall dash / your children on the rock!” (vv. 8-9).
These lines are the fruit of human cruelty; they let us know the depth of the damage we do when we enslave other people, when we blithely consume the cheap products of cheap labor. But what does it mean to find such an image in a book of prayer, a hymn-book of “praises”? The psalms are unrelenting in their realism about the human psyche. They ask us to consider our true situation, and to pray over it. They ask us to be honest about ourselves and admit that we, too, harbor the capacity for vengeance. This psalm functions as a cautionary tale: such a desire, left unchecked, whether buried under “niceness” or violently acted out, can lead to a bitterness so consuming that even the innocent are not spared.
What the psalms offer us is the possibility of transformation, of converting a potentially deadly force such as vengeance into something better. What becomes clear when one begins to engage the psalms in a profound way—and the Benedictines insist that praying them communally, every day, is a good place to start—is that it can come to seem as if the psalms are reading and writing us. This concept comes from an ancient understanding, derived from the Hebrew word for praise, tehilla, that, in the words of the Benedictine Damasus Winzen, “comes from hallal which does not only mean ‘to praise’ but primarily means ‘to radiate’ or ‘to reflect. ’ ” He states that “the medieval Jewish poet Jehuda Halevi expressed beautifully the spirit of the Psalter when he said: ‘Look on the glories of God, and awaken the glory in thee.’ ”
I never felt particularly glorious at morning, noon, or evening prayer in my time with the Benedictines, but I did begin to sense that a rhythm of listening and response was being established between me and the world of the psalms. I felt as if I were becoming part of a living, lived-in poem, a relationship with God that revealed the holy not only in ordinary words but in the mundane events of life, both good and bad. As I was plunged into mysteries beyond my understanding—the God the psalmist has exhorted to speech (“O God, do not keep silence” [Ps. 83:1]) suddenly speaking in the voice of the mysterium tremendum (“from the womb before the dawn I begot you” [Ps. 110:3])—I recognized the truth of what one sister told me. She compared Benedictine liturgy to “falling in love, because you don’t enter into it knowing the depths. It’s a relationship you live with until you begin to understand it.”
In the dynamic of this liturgy one rides the psalms like a river current, noticing in passing how alien these ancient and sophisticated texts are, and how utterly accessible. When I encounter Psalm 61, which asks God to “set me on a rock too high for me to reach” (v. 2), I think of the dying ten-year-old girl in Robert