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Gustave Doré’s engraving of David standing crowned and bowed as he mourns Absalom

Psalm 137

What St Athanasius said to pray when you catch wrong thoughts carrying you off, in a letter from the 300s.

  • 9Verses
  • 1Situation

St Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus

When to pray it

In the 300s, St Athanasius of Alexandria wrote a letter to his friend Marcellinus about praying the Psalms. In it he matched psalms to what people go through. This is what he gave this one for.

Wrong thoughts carried you off, you've just caught yourself, and you're sorry.

If thoughts that aren't your own have taken you captive, and you notice you're being led away and are sorry, stop from now on. Stay where you caught yourself going wrong, sit down and weep, as the exiles did, and say Psalm 137.

Letter to Marcellinus

9 verses, Berean Standard Bible

The whole psalm

Psalm 137

  1. 1By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.
  2. 2There on the willows we hung our harps,
  3. 3for there our captors requested a song; our tormentors demanded songs of joy: “Sing us a song of Zion.”
  4. 4How can we sing a song of the LORD in a foreign land?
  5. 5If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand cease to function.
  6. 6May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not exalt Jerusalem as my greatest joy!
  7. 7Remember, O LORD, the sons of Edom on the day Jerusalem fell: “Destroy it,” they said, “tear it down to its foundations!”
  8. 8O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, blessed is he who repays you as you have done to us.
  9. 9Blessed is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

Psalm 137 is 136 in the Greek numbering Athanasius used, which Orthodox Bibles and some older Catholic ones still follow.

When you've done wrong, or feel the pull to

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Which Psalm are you living right now?

A few honest taps about your life right now, and the psalm an early Church Father gave for exactly that.

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Bible text: Berean Standard Bible, public domain. Athanasius’s advice is paraphrased from his Greek.