March 17/Second Monday of Lent
Let your compassion come speedily to meet us, for we are brought very low.
Let the prisoners’ sighing come before you; with your great power free those doomed to death. Then we your people, the flock of your pasture, will give thanks to you forever;
from generation to generation we will recount your praise. ~ Ps 79.11, 13
Disaster. Utter catastrophe. The shock of something going very wrong in their national life – namely, the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation of the Jews to Babylon by the victors – animates every word of this psalm. And those words can speak to us, today, flailing about for stability or an anchor in a reeling world. At all levels of our existence – personal, communal, global – shocking reversals and calamities may at times occur through which we are shaken to the core, or, in the words of the psalmist, “brought very low.” These may be precipitous, or they may occur in a long slow slide. And, like the Jewish exiles in a strange land, we will probably feel helpless in the face of history, prisoners of capricious fate. It is at those moments that we are most in need of God’s compassion. And when we cry out in our pain, voice our troubles, and ask for that merciful love (note that the Hebrew for “compassion” is derived from the word for “womb,” lending a nurturing maternal undertone to God’s graciousness), we may find to our surprise that lament can yield to thanksgiving, and sorrow transmute into joy. In the well-known and ever apposite African-American spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” the baleful early notes of suffering eventually resolve themselves into a phrase of praise, and the stanza concludes, improbably, “Glory, hallelujah!” For us, too, the somber notes of lamentation can be modulated into the joy of everlasting praise for God’s compassion. Perhaps that’s a song we can sing in troubled times.
O God who unbinds prisoners and lifts the downtrodden, Dispatch your help to me when I cry to you from the low places. Amen.
For today’s readings, click here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/031725.cfm
To hear Paul Robeson sing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” (what did you expect?), click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwYpqJVHHmo
