Morning Prayer, this morning 26 October, invited us to recite Psalm 137. The lectionary had brackets around the two ‘troublesome’ verses at the end which encourage the bashing of heads of little ones. We could choose to omit them to preserve our sensibility. We chose this morning to read them.

I remember when I said these verses with zest and approval. As a student in St Mark's church in Fitzroy, I helped Sister Maree from the Community of the Holy Name (CHN) run holiday programs for children. Fitzroy was what I called a ‘sub-pension’ suburb, known for its poverty and violence. The children were hyperactive, unused to adult control and wildly unpredictable. Mostly, our interactions with them were deeply satisfying. They appreciated the activities and outings St Mark’s provided. On occasion, however, their insistent misbehaviour, vandalism and law-breaking were exasperating. ‘Blessed may he be who takes their little ones and bashes their heads against a stone!”  Blessed indeed, agreed the little community of Fitzroy at Evening Prayer.

I understood our reaction simply to be an expression of our frustration. And maybe it was.

But I am reading some essays which challenge me to go deeper into this issue of difficult texts. Ellen Davis and Richard Hays from my alma mater Duke Divinity School have collected a series of essays on The Art of Reading Scripture. (Eeerdmans 2003).  The impulse for this book is the urgent need of the church to read its sacred texts more seriously. They bear witness to a movement of scholars bumping up against the limits of critical Biblical studies and wanting to re-discover more faithful, more confessional ways of reading our own texts.

They find inspiration both in pre-modern ways of reading the Bible and in the concept of ‘performing’ the Scriptures. We should learn better how to read the Bible from, for example, St Francis of Assisi, who responded to his reading of Scripture by doing it.

The essays underscore the communal context (both now and through time) of the Scriptures. We read them, and learn to read them, in community.

These ideas reverberate with me. At a time when my fellow-believers say in Sydney are reducing the meaning of the text to one ideological interpretation, I grab any help I can get in discovering other ways of honouring the rich complexity of our Bible.

I can see that the difficult verses of Psalm 137 should not simply be ignored, but treated, if not as a “divinely dictated word”, then certainly as “in some sense, a gift from God, … an earnest of God’s blessing for those who seek God in faith,” as Ellen Davis puts it (p. 178).

I see myself as not a highly reactive person. I tend to let things happen and trust God in the unfolding of events. But Psalm 137 invites me into the world of those exiled in Babylon, who hang up their harps because they have no mirth in them. They have nothing to celebrate. Not only have they lost their Temple and their homes, but also they were witnesses to the brutal pillaging of Jerusalem by the Babylonian army.

These exiles have stood in chains and watched their women raped, their children’s bodies hacked apart, their little ones’ heads smashed. However much the Israelites deserved the punishment of exile, the atrocities committed against their family members and friends were real. I begin to ask myself how I would react if I was compelled to watch my daughter or son being tortured to death. I would hope that would raise my level of reactivity, and cause me to cry out in pain to the God I profess to trust.

Now I begin to understand the pain of the authors of Psalm 137. It is not surprising that they are angry and would like to see revenge taken on their captors. If I refuse to say the last two verses of the Psalm, I am refusing to enter into the real pain that is expressed. It is as if I am not validating their feelings: they are entitled to feel anguish and to express it in words.

This is a difficult text, because it reflects a difficult experience. As I read it, I should first of all allow the writers the right to own their own feelings, and to express those emotions in words.

Secondly, the difficult text gives me an opportunity to empathise with this extreme suffering – to the extent that I can, not ever having undergone anything like. I can be grateful to have such an opportunity.

Thirdly, I can acknowledge the bare fact that these are words. While the writers may want revenge, they are not now taking it. They are sublimating their feelings not into dire actions in the real world, but into words. I can learn from their extraordinary response how better to respond in my ordinary life.  A saint is not someone who doesn’t feel the ordinary emotions of humans, but they may become saints by not acting on them.

And finally, I now remember that the Bible is the history of God with God’s people. If the exiles are in agony in Babylon, how much more intense must be the agony of the God who has taken this people for his own.

I am next to embark on a chapter in Davis and Hays’ book on Genesis 22:1-19, the akedah, the binding of Isaac. I shall read that chapter in anticipation that it will further press me to the text of the Bible and welcome even the hard bits as God’s gift.