Kalon

I love liturgy. I've been captivated by the rhythms of it since I started college. I love the feeling that words I'm speaking are tying me to the people speaking them with me, as well as believers throughout history, back through the centuries, back to the time of the Israelite wandering in the desert.

This connection struck me in a much more sobering way today.

One of my books for school is a novel called Silence, by Shusaku Endo, the story of a Portuguese priest in 17th century Japan. In the latter part of the book, Sebastian Rodrigues - the fictional characterization of the real Father Giuseppe Chiara - is imprisoned by the Japanese government. He is allowed to minister to the other imprisoned Christians, but when they refuse to forfeit their faith, they are killed. Again and again, the peasant Japanese die, and the officials push Rodrigues to apostatize. After the death of a young woman who had fed him on his first day in the prison, the priest sits alone in his cell, whispering prayers to himself. He quotes a Psalm he had loved as a child: "My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast! I will sing and make melody! Awake my soul! Awake O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn."

I read those phrases, and couldn't go any farther. We prayed those words a few Sundays ago. I'd chosen them, picked that Psalm as a call to worship on our last week of the Summer in the Psalms series. It was almost painful to imagine the words so joyfully proclaimed by a free gathering of believers having been murmured through parched lips by a man who had the weight of imminent death on his heart. It almost felt wrong, for us in our uninhibited worship to speak the same words of the broken believers in persecuted Japan.

Maybe that was part of the beauty of liturgy, and more importantly Scripture, that I had been missing. It's not only a connection to the joyous and beautiful of our history. It is a link the the despondent, the broken, the abused. It reminds me of something from Mike Cosper's Rhythms of Grace:

The song of the patriarchs is a song born of weeping, of too much drink, of long suffering, of hopeless sojourns and agonizing compromise. It's not a song of affluence and triumph. It's not the song of the saintly, sung in white robes and accompanied by choirs of angels and pitch-perfect orchestration. It sounds far more like drunken sailors, wailing a hazy lament in a land far from home who look to the stars and feel the haunting presence of the promise, clinging to that twilit hope in spite of the curse, in spite of themselves. 

God has made us promises, but in the middle of despair... We cannot see them. Like Rodrigues, we question God's plan and sometimes, even His existence. So we cling to hope, to grace, to the words of those who have gone before, the ones who have faced our same trials and far worse. It's not pretty. It's not shiny. It hurts. It is dark. There is a very real chance that we don't get to see the joy that will come. Like Rodrigues, like the Japanese Christians, we might not live to enjoy the good that will come from our pain. Our trials are smaller, in light of the priest lying prostrate in his dirt cell. But no less real.

I suppose what I'm saying is I need to be reminded that my Psalms of joy and praise are also the Psalms of barely surviving hope in the consuming dark. There is a place for both in the life of the church and of the Christian; and the Scriptures of one may very well belong to the other as well.


kalon
n a beauty that is more than skin deep