Overview:

Friday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for the Friday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time

By the streams of Babylon
we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the aspens of that land
we hung up our harps (Ps 137:1-2).

Find today’s readings here.

For most of this week, the first readings have followed 2 Kings through various sieges and assaults on Jerusalem. Today’s reading, in “the eleventh year of Zedekiah,” sees Jerusalem fall and the king and his soldiers flee. Finally, abandoned by his army, Zedekiah is captured and taken captive into Babylon, as Jerusalem is burned, and the captain of the guard “led into exile the last of the people remaining in the city,” though “some of the country’s poor [were] left behind as vinedressers and farmers.”

Today’s Psalm 137 is a song of exile, certainly the most famous in the Bible and perhaps the most famous in the world. 

Perhaps you recall a musical setting of this psalm. The most well-known, certainly, is the Jamaican reggae version, a Rastafarian spiritual by the Melodians, later popularized by a Boney M. cover version in 1978. 

In reggae and Rastafarianism, “Babylon” means not just the biblical city, but the whole of an oppressive system and the corruption that sustains it. Nor is this metaphorical usage unique to reggae; it shows up within the Bible itself, especially in Revelation.

The reggae spiritual became a protest anthem, both in Jamaica and around the world. Initially banned by the Jamaican government, the ban was lifted once the record’s producer pointed out that the song came from the Bible, and in fact basically was the biblical text.

Though I knew the reggae song, there was another musical version of Psalm 137 in my memory as I prepared this reflection, which a friend helped me pin down. In college, this friend was in a production of Frank McGuinness’s play “Carthaginians,” in which I had first heard this other version. 

“Carthaginians” is set in a graveyard in County Derry in Northern Ireland, after the events of Bloody Sunday, and uses music at several different moments during the play. One of the songs it uses is Don McLean’s “Babylon,” the last track of his 1971 “American Pie” album. And this song, which I heard more than 25 years ago, latched onto my memory enough that I went looking for it again. The psalms can work this way on us sometimes, praying themselves in us “too deep for words.”

Though like the reggae version, it consists exclusively of scriptural text, McLean’s “Babylon” is more a lament than a protest. Sung in a round, overlapping voices recall their weeping and remember Zion, until their repetition becomes a promise to continue to remember.

Remembering Zion, understood as a promise, points to the future even more than it mourns the past. In Psalm 137, the speaker refuses to sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land under oppression, but concludes with a prayer that “my tongue cleave to my palate/ if I remember you not,/ If I place not Jerusalem ahead of my joy.” 

Putting Jerusalem “ahead of my joy” is a profound kind of witness: Even as memory is sorrowful, joy is still possible, but not ahead of the memory—and eventually, implicitly, somehow, the reconciliation and vindication—of the suffering of exile in all its many forms.

In his famous 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” Frederick Douglass invoked Psalm 137 this way, hearing “the mournful wail of millions,” and praying that his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth if he were to forget “those bleeding children of sorrow.” His remembering was a summons and an indictment to those he addressed, and it remains so for us today, a call to remember that the work of justice is not done until all are free and whole and flourishing.

As we approach the 250th Fourth of July in a country still deeply divided, with injustices still unfolding and multiplying especially against our immigrant brothers and sisters, exiles in search of a home, we need that call to lament and to work for justice. We also need the comfort and strength of being able to sing and pray Psalm 137 together. 

There is a live 1973 version of McLean’s “Babylon.” After completing the first rendition of the song, McLean speaks to the crowd, saying: “This is really a very sad song. But there’s always a little glimmer of hope in a song like this one. In the last verse ‘We remember thee/ We remember thee/ We remember thee, Zion’ is the hopeful part, because if you keep the memory of something that you want to come and to be again, then you have hope that someday it will be again.”

And then he asks the crowd to sing it with him again.

Sam Sawyer, S.J., is the editor in chief of America Media.