Sometimes, I look at the world, and I feel helpless. I feel helpless against the political machine that silences and oppresses people and their bodies. I feel helpless against the hunger and unclean water and sickness that robs children of life halfway across the world. I feel helpless in the knowledge that they die and I live simply because of where I was born. I feel helpless as I sit with a woman and her husband of 50 years who is dying. I watch her love and bravery in the face of his fragility, and feel helpless as he slips through her fingers, his mind and body crumbling before our eyes.
And I cannot explain it, but the words of the book of psalms make me feel less helpless. The writer of Psalm 65 cries out to God, "You are the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas....You silence the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples....you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy." Reading these ancient prayers, I become a part of a community: a community that celebrated and grieved, that thanked God and yelled at God, that rejoiced and suffered, that lived and died together. I feel connected to their humanity, to their beauty, and somehow I feel more connected to God. I feel a little less alone, and praying their prayers, joining my voice with their voices, I feel less helpless.
Recently, I stumbled across this poem by William Olsen, and I couldn't help thinking about how the cries of beauty on Jimi Hendrix's electric guitar that Olsen describes are a kind of prayer; A lament; An anguished cry against violence and suffering. And it's hard to explain, but the crying (whether it's in a book of old prayers or coming through a guitar amp) matters in a real, material way; music and poetry and prayer and rock bands-- these things matter because of what they awaken in us. Even the small act of putting words or sounds out into the world is an action. It is a movement. So instead of remaining frozen, paralyzed by our fear, or our doubt, or our grief, we have begun an act that leads to other acts. A word that blossoms into a hope, a song that boils into a protest, a poem that stumbles into a leap of faith.
