“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” The song of the Israelites, exiled and captive, have spoken to the heart through millennia.
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” The song of the Israelites, exiled and captive, have spoken to the heart through millennia.
They have inspired musicians from Palestrina to Boney M; from JS Bach to Leonard Cohen. They will probably have been in the minds of many who have observed the mounting suffering and desperation of refugees from lands ruined by conflict and made unbearable by tyranny.
“ Home no more home to me, whither shall I wander?” asked Robert Louis Stevenson in his ‘Songs of Travel’. The sorrow of no longer being able to live – for whatever reason – in your native place will surely touch any heart which has not been wholly calloused by the calculated and exclusive self-interest of some politicians and formers of opinion.
Great anguish may come to walk closely with hatred. The final verses of the psalm of exile are horrifying and do not often appear in musical settings. The psalmist rails against the ‘Daughter of Babylon’ in these terms : “Fortunate is the man who repays you what you have done to us. Fortunate is the man who will seize and dash your little ones against the rock!”
But in his paraphrase Super flumina Babylonis, the 16th century Spanish poet, priest and mystic, John of the Cross, turns around these words of venom, vengeance and rejection:
Daughter of the Babylonians
Luckless and unhappy maid!
Upon whom my trust was laid,
By whom the weary chastisement
Of your own hand will be repaid.
He will join me with his children,
Because to you my tears were due,
And bring me to the Rock of Jesus
By which I have escaped from you.
You do not need to be a believer in the theory of penal substitution to see that here is a calling to escape the imprisonment of bitterness. It is significant that the poem was written from a prison cell in Toledo, where the intolerance and factionalism of contemporary religion had placed its author.
Our ‘Christian’ Prime Minister speaks of “ swarms” who will find “no safe haven” in the UK while refusing to countenance even the possibility that UK foreign policy may have played a part in the scenes of wretchedness now being played out in Calais and across southern Europe. The rancour of Ukip rhetoric has seeped into many minds, inclining them more towards the vengeful conclusion of the psalmist’s cry of pain than to a compassionate engagement with the reality of its founding experience.
Christianity, being “ not a notion but a way”, offers even those of us who do not think of our religious identity entirely in terms of doctrinal definitions, a light into the darkness which prejudice and fear have set about the ‘migrant crisis’. But to absorb the meaning of the transformative possibilities offered by the poetic paraphrase, we need to find a gracious space in which we may find what that ‘way’ asks of us.
Perhaps a starting point might be the question with which a lawyer tried to trick Jesus: “Who is my neighbour?” And its development is pursued in these words, “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”
So when all the claims and counter-claims, all the fallacies, rebuttals and sparring between electoral advantage and moral responsibility have sickened even those who undertake them, we stand between the psalmist and the poet, the man of law and the man of compassion. A good time to stand still in the Light
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© Jill Segger is an Associate Director of Ekklesia with particular involvement in editorial issues. She is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, Catholic Herald, Tribune, Reform and The Friend, among other publications. Jill is an active Quaker. See: http://www.journalistdirectory.com/journalist/TQig/Jill-Segger You can follow Jill on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/quakerpen