Do We Need to Sing that Chorus Again?

     Whenever a chorus repeats in a song, I think one of two things is going on:

1.       We’re really into it, and the leader notices and repeats to keep it going.

2.       The leader is really into it, and wants us to give it “one more look.”

     This isn’t just a modern phenomenon. It goes way, way back… back even to the Psalms. doesn’t happen often (okay, today there are lots of times when we sing a chorus over and over again; at a former church we called it “Hillsong-ing” a song… all apologies to the lovely people at Hillsong) – it doesn’t happen often in the Psalms – so, when it does, I think we ought to pay attention.

     Psalm 8, for example, begins and ends (verses 1 and 9)with the same words: “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” It’s like a praise song chorus being revisited by those who want to adore the Lord some more. 

     Psalm 59 also has a repeat, but in a whole different way, with a whole different tone and message. In verses 6 and 14 (not the beginning and end) of Psalm 59 you read the phrase, “Each evening they come back, howling like dogs and prowling about the city.”  What a thing to repeat! But… the Psalmist wants us to consider it important.

     Medieval mystic writers like St. John of the Cross would encourage us to think deeply about the way the repeated metaphor in Psalm 59 resonates with our lives. John of the Cross wrote most famously about “The Dark Night of the Soul,” and would ask us what forces come back, prowling and howling like dogs whenever darkness descends? What desires creep up on you when you are tired, or when the light of God seems distant? What howls in your soul, demanding to be fed… under the cover of darkness instead of in the light? It’s easy to turn this into a description of enemies on the outside – and a cursory reading of a Psalm like 59 might lead us to focus on “outside enemies” – but it seems to me to be a more pointed commentary on the way worldly desires operate in our lives. Perhaps we should see these as more of an “enemy” than we do!

     In fact, the repetition of this phrase in verse 14 seems to bear out the idea of desire involved, for at that point in the Psalm, the poet continues on the other side of the refrain with these words: “They roam about for food, and growl if they do not get their fill.” Again, what are the things that demand to be filled – to be satiated – but only in hiding? There is shame, guilt, and sin in this dogged chorus!

     The Psalmist continues, and the solution is revealed: “But I will sing of your might; I will sing aloud of your steadfast love in the morning.” To head back towards the dawn-light of Christ, and the always-available fresh start of a resurrected new life in his name, praise and welcome the light. When those inner dogs set to howling, when hunger for things that remain hidden grows, sing once, sing twice… so the psalmist says. Sing of God’s love and focus on the light. 

     God’s love and Jesus as the Light of the World are refrains that don’t just come up once, and again a few verses later… these are central choruses in scripture the Holy Spirit wants us to own as central in each of our lives.

     Each time the howling dogs come out again at night – on the outside, but especially on the inside – praise the light and sing of the dawn Jesus made possible. Sing the great chorus of God again!

     Do we need to sing that chorus again? Yes, yes we do. The dogs are real, hungry and howling within, but “greater is he who is within you, than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4).”