psalm 98: whenever i feel afraid... 34th week wednesday

During these last days of the liturgical year leading to the season of Advent we are bombarded by readings which speaks of the end, frightful readings which speaks of persecutions, of being seized and handed over even by one's parents and of being sent before kings and governors to be judged and condemned, and of being sentenced to death.  The message is morbid and frightening.  And yet if you notice the psalms these days, and in particular our psalm today, psalm 98 tells us to be joyful, to sing a new song, to join the rivers and the seas and the mountains and the whole cosmos in praising God.  It seems that these days our psalms are particularly chosen so that they can counteract in a sense the fear which our gospel and first reading may have engendered in us, to balance so to say the extremes of fear that leads to hopelessness and the other extreme of indifference, of doing nothing that leads to apathy in the face of the challenges which God is giving us. 

I remember when I was in grade three I was a prince in our production of the King and I and in the play our nanny taught us what to do when we are afraid.  And she sung to us, "whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune so no one would suspect I'm afraid."

Singing I believe is one way of fighting and facing our fears.  If in the Philippines we had the people power revolution that toppled a dictatorship, in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, these are former soviet bloc countries, they had what they call a singing revolution which gave them back their freedom as free nations.  They sung their way to freedom from communism with the spontaneous mass night-singing demonstrations.  Their way of protesting was to gather and sing – thousands gathered and sung.  That was how they earned their freedom.

The psalm says sing a new song.  Old songs were inspired by past graces from God.  We sing new songs because something new is being done in our midst, something new is happening to us – new graces, new manifestations of God's love need also new songs.