On January 29, 1626 at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, John Donne preached a sermon on Psalm 63: 7, “Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.” It is surely one of the greatest sermons ever preached on a psalm in the English language. There are ample reasons for thinking so. Here’s one. Donne gets his congregation to see themselves as enemies of God.

It may be said that God’s enemies is not all that we are. What too often is left unsaid is what makes possible that subjunctive. We lack, too many of us preachers, a biblical theology of God as destroyer, what it cost God for us to get involved with him. That we are at enmity with God is indeed but one aspect of our relation to him, but that there is more to knowing God than resisting him, that there are other aspects of our involvement with God including our loving him, depends utterly on the mercy of the Most High, the mercy that makes possible our hope of receiving it.

Imagine yourself sitting in the nave of St. Paul’s in 1626 as the Dean mounts the pulpit steps. Donne is a man who for all his inimitable talent, for all his genius with words, knew on good authority dejection and death. By 1626, he had lost his beloved wife Ann and five of the twelve children he had with her. Imagine yourself hearing — don’t read but hear them — these words. What you hear is a man preaching to his congregation, but what falls on your ear also is the sound made by a man praying, a man whose emotional skills have been subjected to and shaped not merely by his subjective experience willy-nilly but by the psalms. And therein lay his sermon’s lyric power; Donne speaks as the psalmist does, taking his grief directly to the Most High.

When I shall need peace — because there is none but thou, O Lord, that should stand for me — and then shall find that all the wounds that I have come from thy hand, all the arrows that stick in me, from thy quiver; when I shall see that because I have given myself to my corrupt nature, thou hast changed thine, and because I am all evil towards thee, therefore thou hast given over being good towards me; when it comes to this height, that … mine enemy is not an imaginary enemy, fortune, nor a transitory enemy, malice in great persons, but a real and an irresistable and an inexorable and an everlasting enemy, the Lord of Hosts himself, the Almighty God himself — the Almighty God himself only knows the weight of this affliction, and except he put in that pondus gloriae, that exceeding weight of an eternal glory, with his own hand into the other scale, we are weighed down, we are swallowed up, irreparably, irrevocably, irrecoverably, irremediably.

Thanks to a friend, Victoria and I have heard a number of writers read from their works. Several years ago we heard Christopher Buckley read AC in DC, a comic short story he’d written about the advent of air-conditioning in Washington. With Laurel and Hadi Bahar at this year’s literacy event, I noticed that Buckley had written a memoir and I asked Laurel what she knew of the book. Her brow furrowed. “He airs dirty linen,” she said, disapprobationary.

I google Losing Mum and Pup this morning and find Growing Up Buckley wherein Chris begins by describing his mother’s death in the hospital. Coming to the end of that description, he writes:

Soon after, a doctor came in to remove the respirator. It was quiet and peaceful in the room, just pings and blips from the monitor. I stroked her hair and said, the words coming out of nowhere, surprising me, “I forgive you.”

Not often do the words “I forgive you” cause a priest of the church to utter fecal indictments. My parents are both living. Their home is on Lake Gogebic in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but they are with us now, here at the ready for the high school commencements of Gillian (Friday morning at the National Cathedral) and my nephew Sean Jr. (Friday night, in West Chester, PA). Dear reader: If ever I write a word about my mother’s deficiencies or my father’s, please. Come over to my house. There is a baseball bat in the carport shed. Get it. Find me. And knock my brains out.

Being a Christian, I stand under the authority of the divine law that enjoins us to honor our fathers and mothers. That is now an oddity, sheer mindlessness in this era of overweening self-analysis which eagerly and remorselessly begins by rooting one’s own problems in one’s parents’ shortcomings, thereby dismantling any honor supposed to attach to them. But for any serious Jew or Christian, a most solemn interdict lies across this path. “Honor,” the commandment says, and our Lord Jesus affirms, “honor thy father and mother.” And Jesus, quoting from Exodus 21:17, adds something not taught in Sunday Schools. “He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him surely die,” (Matthew 15).

What does this mean? It means this: Whoever it may be who bears the responsibility for pointing out to others a mother’s faults it is not her son.

Writing about my Great Aunt Mena recently, I used a biblical figure of speech, “singing the Lord’s song in a foreign land”. That phrase is used in Psalm 137, a prayer in a collection of prayers that, like the Bible, wasn’t written for children:

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 tormentors, 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 forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!
Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, ”Lay it bare, lay it bare,
down to its foundations!”
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!

C. S. Lewis says this about Psalm 137. “I know things in the inner world which are like babies; the infantile beginnings of small indulgences, small resentments, which may one day become dipsomania or settled hatred but which woo us and wheedle us with special pleadings and seem so tiny, so helpless that in resisting them we feel we are being cruel to animals. They begin whimpering to us ‘I don’t ask much, but’, or ‘I had at least hoped’, or ‘you owe yourself some consideration’. Against all such pretty infants (the dears have such winning ways) the advice of the Psalm is the best. Knock the little bastards’ brains out. And ‘blessed’ is he who can, for it’s easier said than done.”