By the rivers of Babylon, the exiles sat down and wept, and could not sing the songs of home in a foreign land. This sonnet sits with that old ache of displacement, the grief of the believer who finds herself far from what she knew, and asks how faith survives when everything familiar is gone.
The Sonnet
I sit beside a river not my own, Where willows lean and foreign waters run, And every song I loved has somehow flown, Its melody undone beneath this sun. They ask me for the tunes of happier days, The hymns I sang before I came to this, And I have no voice left with which to raise A joy that this far country cannot kiss. And yet I will not set my harp aside Forever, though it hangs now on the bough, For even exiles are not lost, or denied, The God who kept them then can keep me now. So I will weep beside this foreign stream, And trust the God of home is not a dream.
Reflection
Psalm 137 is one of the rawest psalms in the whole book, written by exiles who could not bring themselves to sing for their captors. Grief and displacement had silenced the very music that had once defined them. There is no quick resolution offered. The psalm simply sits in the ache of being far from home.
Many of us know some version of this exile, not always geographic, but real. The life we knew has changed. The community we loved has scattered. The song we used to sing does not come easily anymore. The psalm gives us permission to name this loss honestly, without forcing a premature comfort. And it also reminds us that God was present with the exiles beside the rivers of Babylon, even when they could not yet sing of it.
If you are far from what once felt like home, you do not have to force the song tonight. Sit by the river. Grieve honestly. The God who kept the exiles is not absent from your foreign shore.
