Grab Your Harp
A Christian Scholar’s Meditation on Psalm 137

By Katherine Clay Bassard
Professor of English
Virginia Commonwealth University

Adapted from a talk given at the C.S. Lewis Foundation
Conference, Berkeley, CA, October 11, 2003.

How shall we sing the lord’s song in a strange land?
-Psalm 137:4

Psalm 137 cries out to us from a place of exile, of homelessness of longing. It resonates with us in the place of our own lamentation and sorrow, our own sense of the injustice of our condition and the monumental size of our task. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

There is a sense of resignation, of discouragement about it—why not hang up our harps? After all, look where we are. No one will hear us, or care. It is too difficult. This isn’t the proper place, or time. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? How shall we be fully Christian in an English department? In a sociology department? In a chemistry department? In the academy? In a secular university? In a state university? In (blankblank): fill in the blank. Fill in your own sense of exile, of homelessness, of longing.

Traditionally, Psalm 137 has been read in commentaries as an expression of the impossibility of singing in captivity, of a patent refusal to sing as a strategy of resistance against oppression, or as a kind of psychological clutching to oneself of holy things in order to preserve them from defilement.  Yet when we realize that this psalm about the impossibility or the difficulty of singing is itself a song, we see it in not only an expression of the problem of exile, but also the solution.

What if we view these words not simply as a lament over the impossibility of the task but a call to perform it even in the face of its impossibility? How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? Read from this perspective, Psalm 137 becomes a mandate for the Christian in exile in the academy and challenges us in three ways:

First, we must sing.

The price of singing is high. It often seems too great a risk. We risk serving the curiosity, mirth or amusement of the captors. We invite scorn and ridicule, even disdain. Our singing may seem inauthentic, the proverbial casting of “pearls before swine.” Most of all we risk rejection--remaining untenured, passed over for promotion or excluded from social functions and positions of influence in our departments and universities.

Yes, the price of singing is high, but the price of silence is higher still. Verse six alludes to it: “If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” The price of silence is forgetting. The price of silence is the risk of losing the ability to utter or to speak at all. There is that within us that requires, even demands expression of our deepest, most authentic self and to suppress it is to die a sort of death of the soul.

The price of silence is to leave “those who carried us away captive” (3) without a song. Ironically, those who would silence us are those most in need of what we have to say. We must sing because we stand on the other side of the Cross. Our captors may be requiring of us a song, but God also requires our song.

Secondly, We must sing in a strange land.

We are in hostile, alien territory. We are on unholy ground. I have news for you: God knows exactly where you are! It’s part of His design. He Himself came to earth as a sojourner, an alien in hostile territory: “and the word was made flesh and dwelt among them.” The entirety of scripture is a story about exile, alienation and wilderness wanderings.

Thirdly, we must sing the Lord’s song.

Not a song of our own choosing. Not a song of our own making. Not a song that will bring glory to ourselves but one that will bring glory to the one who has “called us out of darkness into His marvelous light.”

So, grab your harp! Sing unto the Lord a new song. I draw inspiration from the song sung at the end of the ages in the book of Revelation 15:3-4, the song of Moses and of the Lamb:

“They sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying:

Great and marvelous are Your works,
Lord God Almighty!
Just and true are Your ways,
O King of he saints!
Who shall not fear You, O Lord,
And glorify Your name?
For You alone are holy.”

Up Close and Personal with Katherine Clay Bassard
An Interview

RI: How have you seen in your own life that “the price of singing is high?”

KB: I think it is difficult on a day-to-day basis interpersonally when one is an open Christian in a department on a secular university. There’s just a sense of not being included socially. But also if you want your scholarship to be informed by your religious views, which I think we have to do as Christian scholars, you risk rejection by certain publications and you have to imagine alternatives. Tenure promotion can be very difficult for Christians if you are at a school where there is a hostile environment.

RI: You write that those who would silence us are those most in need of what we have to say.

KB: We are sent by the Great Commission to be ambassadors for Christ. The irony of that is we often get opposition from the people who most stand in need of the Gospel.

I think of Paul’s experience: he was stoned, left for dead and put in jail, but there remained in him this real commitment to the people he was speaking to despite the treatment he received in return. That is the kind of posture we have to have. If we take up an oppositional posture—of seeing colleagues as enemies or as “us against them”—then we aren’t really following the way of Christ. We always have to remember they are in need of the message of redemption. We need to have a kind of “ethos of love” when we communicate our faith and in our interactions in our department.

We were recently hiring a fiction writer for our department and as he read his entertaining story there were a lot of hostile references to Jesus. I remember clenching up because I wasn’t prepared for it. I wondered what I should do—should I write him off as someone I don’t want to be around? Should I be combative? I do remember [choosing to put] him on a list of people I would want to befriend. It’s those kind of moments we are put off guard. We want to pull ourselves away and distance ourselves—it’s often in those moments that Christ is calling us to draw near to a person.

I grew up in a Christian home. My grandfather was the pastor of the church, and I received Christ as a child. But as so often happens, I drifted away, which coincided with my entrance into the university.

I think that’s one of the reasons I have a passion for this because it is a place where students who grow up in Christian homes can so easily be pulled away as they hear new ideas, and they are on their own for the first time. It wasn’t until graduate school, when I was really into ambitions about my career, reading all the literature on post-structuralist theory, that a fellow student who remains a good friend came alongside me. She listened to all my ranting and raving and continued to be my friend, but gently introduced topics into the conversation, like “sin.” It brought me back and reminded me of my faith and that the academic life isn’t a substitution for living a life fully in Christ.

RI: Anything you would like to share with Christian professors?

KB: This is a time for boldness and courage for the body of Christ within the university context. Understanding how difficult that can be, I would encourage colleagues to not short-change God. God can do anything.

When our focus is more on the strength and the power, the love and the awesomeness of the God we serve, rather than on our career path and whether I get published, He does some absolutely amazing things. To just trust Him with that, to really put our careers squarely in His hands—that way He will be glorified.

The surprising thing is that He has this way of opening doors that we often thought were shut if we trust Him in that way. I left Cal Berkeley after I received tenure as an English professor in 1998—many people find it amazing that I would leave Berkeley. But I felt that God was calling us back to be near family and for ministry. The Lord opened a door here at Virginia Commonwealth, which is more of a teaching university with a large, diverse student body. I really enjoy it here.

Katherine Clay Bassard is author of
Spiritual Interrogations (1999, Princeton Univ. Press)

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