From July 6 to 22, 2012, Connie Wardle participated in a pilgrimage through countries touched by the Protestant Reformation—France, Switzerland and Scotland. This is the second of a series of reflections on the journey.
According to the elders who met us in their church in Meaux, theirs is the oldest Reformed congregation in what was, at the time of the Reformation, France.
It traces its history back to 1546. A small band of Protestants in Meaux wanted to select someone to lead them, so they sought advice in Strasbourg, then an independent city that had embraced the Reformed faith. It was where John Calvin pastored a congregation from 1538 to 1541.
The group chose a fellow named Pierre Le Clerc to be their first leader. And tragedy followed.
Only a few months later, on Oct. 7, Le Clerc and 13 others were burned at the stake as heretics. According to local legend, before they were paraded through the streets to be killed, their tongues were cut out to keep them from preaching. They could still hum Psalms, however.
Today, at the back of the sanctuary, two marble plaques flank the doors. They bear the names of the 14 martyrs burned during the congregation’s founding. Above the doors, large letters declare: “Dieu est amour.” God is love.
A few days later, we were in Strasbourg. We sat in a small room in the Bouclier, on the site of Calvin’s former church. Jackhammers rumbled in the street as we talked about the Psalms.
“There was a time when we sang nothing but Psalms in Presbyterian churches; today we sing anything but Psalms,” said Rev. Dr. Roberta Clare, director of the Elders’ Institute. She called them the “greatest weapon of the Reformation.”
The ancient hymns were meant to be sung by the community. “In singing the Psalms together, our words become God’s words. Something deeply spiritual happens,” Clare said.
In churches, we shy away from many of the Psalms because they are not happy or joyful or even particularly pleasant. They give voice to anger and frustration and profound sorrow. These are not things we think belong in church services. Yet there is something very therapeutic about saying or singing sorrowful Psalms as a community, she suggested.
The church has experienced a great deal of pain throughout its history. It still does in many places. It has also caused a great deal of pain.
I thought back to the martyrs and their plaques and the love of God. What must it be like, I wondered, to found a church on the ashes of your brethren? To keep the faith at such a cost? To try to forgive other Christians who condemned your friends as heretics?
I could see why those heart-wrenching Psalms spoke to the reforming church. It’s a powerful thing to pray words that have been prayed for millennia—words prayed by countless people before you were born, and which will be prayed by countless people long after your body has turned to dust.
“I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, ‘An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul,'” Calvin wrote of the Psalms, “for there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror. Or rather, the Holy Spirit has here drawn to the life all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated. … Genuine and earnest prayer proceeds first from a sense of our need, and next, from faith in the promises of God.”
