Let My Tongue Be Silenced,
If I Ever Forget You
The Old Testament reading is taken from 2 Chronicles. The account is a “Cliff Notes” version of the Babylonian Exile, a natural outcome to the people’s unfaithfulness to God. Psalm 137 provides insight into the exilic experience. It is a soul-wrenching psalm of lament of refugees forced from their beloved city into slavery. As the psalmist tells us, the Judeans were taunted by the Babylonians, who asked the exiles to sing songs from their homeland. The exiles refused to sing; instead they held fast to their fond memories of Jerusalem as expressed in the refrain. We might pray this psalm in solidarity with people in exile and refugees and the oppressed. We might pray this psalm as a dirge with “sister earth, along with all the abandoned of our world, to cry out, pleading that we take another course.” Psalm 137 offers us the challenging invitation to allow ourselves to feel the pain of what is lacking in what should be communion among earth, her creatures and our Creator. May we have the courage to pray this psalm in the name of oppressed peoples and our suffering Mother Earth.
By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How shall we sing God’s song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my hand wither!
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem above all my joys!
[verses adapted from People’s Companion to the Breviary © 1997 by the Carmelites of Indianapolis]