Necessary songs: The case for singing the entire Psalter
When I asked my dad what songs he sang in church during the war, he explained that with his native Netherlands under Nazi occupation, worshipers couldn’t sing anything that smacked of nationalism—nothing that would undermine the powerful oppressors. Corrie ten Boom, famed author of The Hiding Place, wrote about her brother’s imprisonment for intoning the national anthem on the organ after a church service. But in my father’s conservative Calvinist congregation, this was not an issue. They would not think of singing the national anthem in the liturgy. They would not even sing hymns. They stuck to psalms sung to the Genevan tunes that had been handed down by John Calvin. The Nazis saw the church’s Psalter as innocuous. Little did they know.
My father recounted, “In the morning we might sing strains of Psalm 68 . . . ‘Let God rise up, let his enemies be scattered; let those who hate him flee before him.’” The lofty melody made the text soar. God comes in procession and leads the captives to freedom. This psalm, and many like it, ennobled the church to assert its voice, to nerve a people who were resisting the forces of evil. “Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up; God is our salvation.”
After musing a bit my father added, “At night we sometimes sang a different sort of psalm.” He recalled particularly the congregation’s vesper singing of Psalm 79. This is no triumph song. The text drips with fear, doubt, anger and even wishes for revenge. My dad then recited in Dutch strophes of Psalm 79 that he knows by memory. “O God, the nations have come into your inheritance . . . they have murdered your people . . . How long, O Lord? . . . save those doomed to die . . . repay the people who are doing this to us . . .” After thinking about these nighttime cries and curses, my father smiled sadly and sighed. “We probably should not have sung these psalms. We were angry. It wasn’t very Christian.”
