By The Waters of Babylon
A parishioner of St Mary Byzantine Catholic Church, Hillsborough NJ
“By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors required of us songs,
and our tormenters, mirth, saying ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
If I forget you O Jerusalem, let my right 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 my highest joy!”
-Psalm 136 -
Everyone can feel that something is wrong in our society, but nobody can quite explain what it is. We have everything we want, and we don’t have enough. We seek peace through frantic activity, and we cannot find it. We are always “fine” when asked, but secretly we are doing everything possible through endless distractions to bury the dread thought that we are out of place, that something is amiss, that we are sick, and that the world in which we live is hanging by a thread.
The Church alone knows why this is, and it tells us plainly: we have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God. We are not in the paradise for which we were made. We are made for God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. We are made in His image, but have disfigured His likeness. The focus of Lent in the Byzantine tradition is to imitate the prodigal son, to “come to our senses”, to get up and go to our Father in repentance.
The Church prepares us liturgically on the three Sundays preceding the Great Fast by chanting Psalm 136 at Matins, and at the beginning of the Divine Liturgy. Through this psalm, the Church puts words to what we already feel. We sit down and weep as we feel this sense of exile, because that is where we are. We’re not in the homeland of our heart’s desire. We long for Jerusalem, the “city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Hebrews 12).
Yet the kingdom of God is not a place in the future, but through Christ it is offered here and now. We can even right now begin to live in it, to the extent that we repent and live in it. Lent in the Eastern Christian tradition is focused on repentance. It is not a time for Christianized self-help, or for sentimental piety, or artificial melancholy. It is a “bright sadness”, in which we mourn for our sins, but with joy, because we have so glorious a Savior. As we begin the Great Fast, let us remember Jerusalem, and set that above our highest joy.
Venmo: @stmarybyzbnj