Friday, November 12, 2010

Stone Me!

'Filia Babylonis misera beatus qui retribuet tibi retributionem tuam quam retribuisti nobis. Beatus qui tenebit et adlidet parvulos tuos ad petram.'

...Let me make it clear at the outset that I have nothing against the good Daughters of Babylon, singular or plural. Indeed I count several such as dear friends. (H, by the way, does not need to know this!) Thus when I liturgically chant that I would wish someone should take their babies and dash them against the rocks, I am merely voicing the Psalmist's ancient passion of sorrow and despair, not my own advocacy of selective infanticide.

Why this necessary caveat? Lest I find myself collared after Vespers because some over-zealous commentator has seen fit to report me to plod for inciting racial hatred, when one has merely been dutifully following the established rubric of the Book of Common Prayer.

What a sad sea-change there has been. Time was when discussion on these troubling lines - for they are harsh and hard - would content itself with an understanding of what it is to sing the sacred scary words, how anger at wrong doing - righteous anger - can so enrage the human heart that death of the innocent is demanded. One was to consider the horror of slavery, the misery of captivity, the destructive raging of the powerless. Also to reflect on one's own furnace of anger that might, at any moment, erupt as deadly as any volcano. Above all, to contemplate the Way of Christ that so utterly overturns the human desire for revenge, whose justice is truly not of this world and whose mercy is infinite.

And so forth. Something for the God Squad to chew over and no one else's business. Not now though, for we have allowed to be created a society based on comprehensive surveillance of every thought and word - let alone action; they being continuously and overtly tested against a prescribed and po-faced secular Jansenism.

Non-compliance is not merely reprehensible, it is criminal and sinful both. The blameless are denounced as witches with an abandon that would make even the denizens of Salem blush.  Judgment Day is now to be found in a Magistrates' Court, not the Court of Heaven. Enforced auto-da-fé public confessions of guilt and remorse flourish in every marketplace and newspaper, with an ease that would cause even dear Tomás de Torquemada to draw breath and ponder.

All our gnats are filtered and all our camels swallowed. Thus it is that - with some growing trepidation - this evening I shall turn to the two or three (rarely more sadly) gathered together in His name and murmur: "We shall now sing Psalm 136 'By The Waters of Babylon', and if anyone is intending to nick me could they kindly wait until after Benediction?"

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