Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann describes how praying with the Psalms can be an act of solidarity with our universal humanity:
The Psalms, with few exceptions, are not the voice of God addressing us. They are rather the voice of our own common humanity—gathered over a long period of time, but a voice that continues to have amazing authenticity and contemporaneity. It speaks about life the way it really is, for in those deeply human dimensions the same issues and possibilities persist. And so when we turn to the Psalms it means we enter into the midst of that voice of humanity and decide to take our stand with that voice. We are prepared to speak among them and with them and for them, to express our solidarity with this anguished, joyous human pilgrimage. We add a voice to the common elation, shared grief, and communal rage that besets us all…. When we do, we shall find that the words of Scripture bring power, shape, and authority to what we know about ourselves. [1]
Exiled from Cuba, theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz (1943–2012) found solace in Psalm 137:
When I first read Psalm 137, I remember resonating with most of what the psalm says; I remember feeling it could appropriately voice the pain I was experiencing being away from my country against my will. After the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 I realized that my absence from Cuba was to a be a long one. Shortly after there came a day when my visa status changed from “tourist”: I became a refugee. Psalm 137 became my refuge: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and we wept when we remembered Jerusalem” (137:1).
I recall vividly the day I dared to mention to a friend how much I identified with Psalm 137. Jokingly she answered me, “Are you going to hang your guitar from a tree?”… They were incapable of understanding the sorrow of being away from la tierra que mi vió nacer (the land that witnessed my birth). At times, my friends would ask me to talk about Cuba. Those around me could not figure out why I, who love to sing, always seemed reticent about singing “Guantamanera,” the song that uses for its verses poems from the father of my country, José Martí. One of them says,
Yo quiero cuando me muera
Sin patria pero sin amo
Tener en mi tumba
Un ramo de flores
Y una bandera.
I want when I die
without country but without master,
to have on my tomb
a bouquet of flowers
and a flag.
So I kept saying to myself, “How can we sing Yahweh’s song in a foreign land?” (137:4) [2]
Brueggemann concludes:
The psalms are not used in a vacuum, but in a history where we are dying and rising, and in a history where God is at work, ending our lives and making gracious new beginnings for us. The Psalms move with our experience. They may also take us beyond our own guarded experience into the more poignant pilgrimages of our sisters and brothers. [3]
References:
[1] Walter Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms: Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit, 2nd ed. (Cascade Books, 2007), 1–2.
[2] Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Orbis Books, 1996), 35–36.
[3] Brueggemann, Praying, 15.
Image credit and inspiration: Michael Sturgeon, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Ukraine, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The drummer holds on to the inner rhythm that exile cannot erase—a rhythm echoed in the Psalms—the power of music to name oppression, remember home, and resist forgetting.
Story from Our Community:
I was once invited by a visiting professor at Boston College to write my own psalm of lament. It was an amazing experience as I was going through a very difficult time in my personal life. I often suggest trying it to others who are struggling. The basic structure is to cry out to God, complain, ask for help, express trust, and end with praise and thanksgiving. It can bring great peace.
—Eileen M.
