The Fire Next Time
AM Psalm 137:1-6(7-9), 144 • PM Psalm 104
Job 3:1-26 • Acts 9:10-19a • John 6:41-51
For me, one of the most moving lines in the Psalms, indeed in all of Scripture, is the first verse of today’s Psalm 137:
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down, and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
This psalm of pain and loss has inspired many stories and songs. My friend Derek Ven Lynn notes that there’s even a Reggae version, “By The Rivers of Babylon,” by The Melodians, from the soundtrack of Jimmy Cliff’s 1972 film, “The Harder They Come.”
The story I remember from my junior high days is “By The Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benét. You may know it. The story begins:
“The north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a priest. Afterwards, both the man and the metal must be purified. These are the rules and the laws; they are well made. It is forbidden to cross the great river and look upon the place that was the Place of the Gods—this is most strictly forbidden. We do not even say its name though we know its name. It is there that spirits live, and demons—it is there that there are the ashes of the Great Burning. These things are forbidden—they have been forbidden since the beginning of time.”
In the world of this story, rituals and taboos have long been established, perhaps in the service of societal survival, although a convenient side effect might be so that the “priests” can keep everybody else in line. Later, the narrator discovers a statue of a god who, according to the inscription chiseled into the base, is named “ASHING.” This is one of several narrative clues that allow us to get a context for the story.
The story is an example of “post-apocalyptic” fiction – an imaginative rendering of what life (what is left of it) might be like after a war (Planet of the Apes), or arrival of aliens (Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke), or technology run amok (The Terminator, The Matrix). Or natural disaster. For that matter, Noah’s story after The Flood qualifies as post-apocalyptic literature.
Or a pandemic: Richard Mathieson’s I Am Legend has been made into several different movies. And if you have had occasion to think of Stephen King’s The Stand after the events of the past two years, you’re not alone.
As a kid, when I first read Benét’s “By the Waters of Babylon,” I thought that it imagined the aftermath of a nuclear war. I am of a generation that remembers “Duck and Cover” drills. If our teachers had doubts as to whether these actions actually would keep us alive during a nuclear attack, they kept such doubts to themselves. By coincidence (and Jung would say that these things do not happen by accident), the day my piece is due to the church office so that it can be published “today” is August 6, the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
In fact, “By The Waters of Babylon” was published with the title “The Place of the Gods” in The Saturday Evening Post, July 31, 1937, before anyone knew of the horror of nuclear war. According to Wikipedia, Benét wrote the story in response to the Fascist bombing of the Basque town of Guernica. You might know Picasso’s painting, “Guernica,” inspired by this atrocity. Civilians were defenseless against what Benét in his story calls “fire falling from the sky.” Benét also writes of a “deadly mist” which, again according to Wikipedia, could call to mind the mustard gas and other horrors of World War I.
The cataclysmic event in Palm 137 is, of course, the Babylonian captivity. The people of Zion have been taken from their homes and kept in a foreign land. They yearn for home as they sit and weep and lament its loss. Benét’s story ends with the hope of being able to “build again.” Psalm 137 ends with the psalmist wanting revenge by dashing Babylonian babies against a wall.
Some might ask: does God really condone such revenge? A better question might be: when we read such scripture, what can we do when we sit and weep, no matter the depth of our suffering? Where are we, in this place, in this time, in relation to God?
Written by James Gamble
James Gamble is grateful to be starting his third year in Education for Ministry.