Douglas Hickey
Friends,
Confession: It’s a struggle for me to orient myself to the spiritual world. To some extent, this is cultural. As moderns (and, too often, as Episcopalians) we downplay spirit.
Spirituality is “vague” or “gauzy.” Spirit lacks substance. To the extent we talk at all about “spiritual truth,” we mean a kind of emotive wishful thinking or mytho-poetic gloss on the Material Fact, which is King.
But spiritual truth isn’t a metaphor; it is the elusive something metaphor approaches. Nor is the spiritual world a projection of human desiring onto material fact; it is the fullness of Being that our sin—and death-haunted material realm only ever discloses in part.
God is Spirit. Christ tells us that true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit. St. Paul tells us the physical body is sown in dishonor but will be raised again a spiritual body. Scripture and sacred tradition are united in asserting that what is ultimate, what is eternal, what is Real is spirit.
To treat spirit as secondary to anything else, then, is to build an idol.
I do this every day.
Today’s Psalm demands to be read spiritually, and what I do not mean is “waved off.” I mean something more like “contemplated with seriousness, humility, and care.”
The Psalmist describes weeping by the rivers of Babylon, recalls torments inflicted by his captors, laments the destruction of Jerusalem, and imagines vengeance: “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock.”
The all-too-human sentiment, however ugly, is relatable enough. How many of us would feel wrathful? To see your homeland, twisted, desecrated, or dismantled is in some sense the end of a world.
“Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, ‘Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!”
And yet a spiritual reading of Psalm 137 (and here I follow St. Augustine) reminds us that if we measure captivity by the contingencies of historical circumstances, our lament falls short of the spiritual captivity we all inhabit.
Our enslavement is never merely to the vagaries of man-made empires, but to the powers of sin and death we carry inside us.
“How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?”
Remember Zion. Our home. God’s own city.
Brothers and sisters, Christ is King.
And on this rock all the powers of hell will shatter.
Pax,
—Douglas