If you add one to one you get two, if you add another one you get three. This growth will continue indefinitely as you continue to add. This is not a hard concept to grasp, it is easily visualized, it is logical. You cannot add one to anything and get zero (at any rate not if we are talking about whole numbers and positive numbers, which for these purposes we are). The more you add, the more you have. That’s just basic math. Hold this thought for a moment.

I am part of a bible study, which for the last year or so has been working through the Book of Psalms. I am struck, week after week, by the honesty of these works, the humanness they express emotionally, and the way they can speak to us today, over thousands of years. Sometimes you read a psalm and think , ‘that has nothing to do with my life or this world,’ after all it is about David being chased by political enemies, but then you realize it is about a man who is struggling with his role, with the tension of remaining faithful in the midst of fear and despair, and you think, ‘well maybe this does have something to teach me about trusting God when things are not going my way.’ Just like I don’t think every feeling I have needs to be actively lived out, I don’t think the Psalms are meant to be a guidebook for how to live. I do think they are a guidebook for how to be honest and to work through the hard moments of life while patiently, trusting God’s presence even when you don’t see it or feel it.

Last night we were working through Psalm 137. It’s a tough one. The jewish people have been taken into exile in Babylon and they lament by the banks of the river. But hold on a second, is that really what is going on? Verse 4 reads, “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” It feels like deep despair. Someone in the study group pointed out the ways in which captives are often made to perform their culture to entertain the captors and that this reaction reflects that pain. Fair enough. But as I read the whole piece I wondered if something else could be going on here, something else we were supposed to learn about what happens when we hold onto pain and anger.

You see, at the beginning of the psalm we are told that the people are sitting by the rivers, this is a place of nourishment in a dry land. We are told that they are sheltered by willows, a “luxurious” tree described in Leviticus, so far it seems like where the people are is not so bad. To be sure, it is not their home, they are no longer in power, it is not the their choice. And yet, there are hints here, that they are not in the worst of situations. Then you get to the last few lines of the psalm, the lines where they call for vengeance, for terrible pain to be enacted on the enemy. Finally, we get to the line that says, ‘and after they suffer, then balance will be restored.’

Now we come back to our earlier math lesson, and what I think is actually the whole point of this psalm. It is interesting to me that nowhere in this do we hear God speaking. The only mention of God is the inability of the people to sing praises because of their circumstances. Nowhere do we hear God say, ‘that’s right, once I get back at those awful Babylonians then everything will be okay.’ This is entirely the people talking, and the logic they miss is the logic we all miss when we are hurt, angry, experiencing pain and humiliation: causing pain to your enemy does not erase your pain, does not change your situation. It compounds the quantity of pain in the universe.

You cannot add hurt to hurt and expect to get relief, all you get is more hurt. And when you are full of hurt, when you are steeped in anger and wanting revenge you cannot sing the songs of the Lord which are songs about love, kindness, compassion, gentleness. The lesson I think we are supposed to take from this psalm is not a lesson about appropriate levels of revenge to get to balance, that math will never work; the lesson, I believe, is that when your mouth is full of hate, words of love cannot come out of you.

When we find ourselves in places we don’t want to be, places that may not be familiar or comfortable, can we look around and see where God is still with us? Can we look around and remind ourselves that anger begets anger, and that if we want to find ourselves in the presence of the Lord, wherever we are, forgiveness is the only variable that can make room an equation that includes love.

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