Note: this Guest Card Talk is a learned response to our canon card “Babies with their brains dashed against stones (Psalms 137)”
Let’s say you use the psalms as part of your devotions: you read them, or pray them, or chant them, whatever. Maybe you do it on a fixed schedule, the way millions of nuns and monks have for centuries. One day the schedule comes round to Psalm 137. You start to pray it as you pray any psalm, but then you hit verse 9, and you Just. Can’t. Do it.
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock.
I couldn’t pray this either, not for the longest time, until the one day I did and it changed something essential in the way I see race. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Why is praying this dreadful verse even a thing?
Pope Paul VI tried to make it not a thing. During the development of the Liturgy of the Hours—the go-to prayer book for Roman Catholics—the pope omitted this verse and about 120 other imprecatory passages (basically, curses), citing the “psychological difficulty” they cause. I get it, and I’ll bet you do too. His Holiness made this omission, however, against the wishes of the very advising commission overseeing the development, and the debate continues to this day.
Skipping the nasties is not limited to the Catholic Church. The Revised Common Lectionary and other Protestant liturgical books omit them as well. Perfectly reasonable, right?
But maybe it’s not that simple. To understand why, we need to look closely at the psalm itself.
Psalm 137 focuses on the most devastating catastrophe to befall ancient Israel: the destruction of Jerusalem (including the Temple) and the seventy-year captivity in Babylon. Somewhere in this disaster, the Babylonian tormentors find yet another way to torment: they ask Israel’s harpists for mirth. “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” (vs. 3).
It’s easy to gloss over this, for me at least—it was centuries ago, water under the bridge and all that—but think about what’s being asked. A captive harpist could not, under any circumstances, “sing a song of Zion” in Babylon. (Hence the next verse: How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?). Those songs expressed the beating heart of Zion: its culture, its tribes, its Torah, its God, everything the Jews treasured. They’re not fillers for the Saturday night lineup; they’re an act of worship, of Jewishness itself.
Not feeling the horror yet? Try this. Imagine you’re a plantation owner in antebellum America, and you’re putting on a little after-dinner show for some distinguished guests. You’ve heard your slaves singing in the fields, and one of them is very good, so you approach him and say, “Hey, we’re having some people over tonight, and they’ll be expecting entertainment after dinner. So c’mon up to the house and sing us one of those ditties you colored folks sing in your prayer meetings.”
No. Just. No.
Now throw in the Edomites from verse 7:
Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
The day of Jerusalem’s fall,
How they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down to its foundations!”
As you may recall, the Edomites originated with Esau, the brother of Jacob. You might think that common ancestry (conflicted as it was) might hold the two countries together, but no. Not only did the Edomites jeer on Babylon’s destruction of Jerusalem, they stationed themselves on the perimeter of the city, caught any fleeing Israelites, and returned them to Babylon’s army for execution or enslavement. Now that I know that, I get furious reading this verse. Verse 8 then turns the attention back to Babylon, starting the call for vengeance that culminates in the child-bashing verse 9.
By this point, verse 9 isn’t so scandalous. It’s not even surprising. The rage here is what so many oppressed people feel every day. Which is why I’ll go out on a limb and say that for certain folks (I’m looking at us, white people) praying it should be a thing.
I say this because of how the verse changed me. As a white person, I haven’t experienced bone-deep rage many times in my life, if ever. I have zero experience with grinding, tormenting, humiliating oppression. By praying this psalm, I came face to face with the tiniest glimpse of what it’s like to be oppressed, and the fury it deserves. That glimpse moved me one step further toward listening long, deeply, with full attention whenever Black people talk about their history and life in America today. I don’t know it firsthand—I can’t—so I must hear them and consider the reality they present.
When you see it this way, Psalm 137 becomes an eloquent and powerful response to the question sometimes asked by white people, “Why are Black people so angry?” If you’re asking that question, start with this psalm—and then go read everything you can find written by Black people about Black experience. After a while happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock won’t surprise you either.
*A spiritual director, bigender person, and quasi-hermit, John Backman writes about ancient spirituality and the ways it collides with postmodern life. This includes a book (Why Can’t We Talk? Christian Wisdom on Dialogue as a Habit of the Heart) and personal essays in Catapult and many other journals. John has presented at a range of conferences, including the 2015 Parliament of the World’s Religions.
