“Did some bird flap its wings over in Asia?
Did some force take you because I didn’t pray?”
Taylor Swift's Bigger Than The Whole Sky
Taylor Swift is hardly the first artist to handle suffering by writing poetry, and dealing with death by seeking some consolation in faith. This particular track which may or may have to do with a miscarriage she had references her Christian upbringing and wrestling with faith. But what caught my eye here are the wings flapping up above -- perhaps a reference to the celestial wings that one finds in so much religious literature as a symbol for divine protection.
An article about Taylor Swift's Faith literally names one of her songs as
“ a lament reminiscent of a Davidic psalm. One can only guess that it was never included in any of her early albums because it’s openly critical of God - such a sentiment would not have played well with Swift's early audience.”
Way before Swift, poets like the ones who wrote the PSLAMS were wrestling with hardships, wondering whether there is a guiding hand - and often insisting that there is indeed a kind eye watching and protection from danger at the most perilous times.
We know too well how often tragedies prove otherwise, as innocents are harmed, and so often in the name of faith. And yet - how do we still hold on to some notion that there are great wings there to hold us as we fall?
This psalm is a prayer that begs for intimate security:
שָׁ֭מְרֵנִי כְּאִישׁ֣וֹן בַּת־עָ֑יִן בְּצֵ֥ל כְּ֝נָפֶ֗יךָ תַּסְתִּירֵֽנִי׃
Protect me as the apple of the eye, Hide me in the shadow of your wings.
Ps 17:8
The image of God’s wings shows up in many prayers and in multiple traditions - from the narratives of First Nations to the most obscure Sci-Fi depictions of angels. The wings of eagles are described through the Hebrew Bible as the means with which the Hebrews were led out of Egypt and through the wilderness on their journey to the promised land.
Our liturgy for lamentations and for mourning includes the prayer - may we be protected by the wings of the divine.
We wish to matter, to be held in care, seen by the divine source and protected. Our most baby-like desire emerges from these sentiments, our innermost fears. But what happens when we lose the language of the mystical? When in our world, suspicious of faith, torn by terror, there is so little protection and so often the ones who speak for the divine are those to inflict suffering?
What happens to our metaphoric meaning making then?
Rabbi Toba Spitzer writes here wisely about our need to reclaim these metaphors:
“What I’ve come to understand in recent years is that the “God problem” that so many people have—the difficulty of believing in or even taking seriously the notion of some kind of all-powerful, all-knowing Being that interacts with us in mysterious ways—is not really a problem with God. Rather, it’s a reaction to a metaphor, or a set of metaphors, that have come to dominate our thinking about God. What is sad about this is that once upon a time, our ancestors employed a rich palette of metaphors to shape their experience of the Divine, metaphors that spoke directly to their everyday experiences. My hope is that we can recapture the alive-ness which once pervaded our holy texts, and reconstruct our metaphors so that they are once again engaging and meaningful.”
Seeking comfort and solace under the wings of the divine is just one of many options for reimagining our relationship with the sacred source of life and death. Taylor Swift, along with many other far less famous seekers, reminds us that especially at tough times we are roused from illusion to find our way to intertwined existence, looking in, and up, and all around, to reconnect to something greater than the sum of our parts.
Perhaps that’s what Emily Dickinson, another great poet, meant when she wrote about “Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul”?
The divine wings will make another dramatic appearance in tomorrow’s PSLAM.
What’s the metaphor, with or without feathers, that may be meaningful to you, today?
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