Sabbath Devotional :: Verleih Uns Frieden
This week’s devotional is musical. In a version of my life where I was a little more talented and a lot braver, I would have studied choral conducting in college (formally, instead of just by spending more time in choir rehearsals than in class!). I might have made it my life’s work to champion the underrated choral works of Felix Mendelssohn—more interesting than Handel, more accessible for most choirs than Brahms. This week I’ve had his motet ‘Verleih Uns Frieden’ running through my head. It’s a fairly simple piece—your ward choir could learn it in 5 or 6 solid rehearsals—and the text is an interesting German variant of Dona Nobis Pacem, “grant us peace,” a paraphrase by Martin Luther.
Verleih uns frieden gnädiglich,
Herr Gott! zu unsern zeiten
Es ist doch ja kein and’rer nicht,
Der für uns könnte streiten,
Denn du unser Gott alleine.
Grant us peace, graciously,
Lord God, in our time;
there is no one else
who could fight for us
except you, our God, alone.
In Luther’s German the word that is always translated “grant” or “give” is “Verleih,” which is more often rendered as “lend” or “loan” in other contexts. This is a useful way to think of peace, at least in this world— it can’t be given, only borrowed from God for sweet moments between the ordinary troubles and occasional dramatic conflicts of our lives.
The other line that stands out to me is the grammatical thicket “Es ist doch ja kein andrer nicht der für uns könnte streiten.” A straightforward English translation would be “there is no other who can fight for us.” But the German has both an emphatically doubled positive “doch ja” and a double negative “kein…nicht.” I’m not a native speaker of German, but I have read a goodly number of German texts, and I’m pretty sure that this doesn’t actually make sense, and I’ve never seen the usage anywhere else. “Doch” is a sort of emphatic affirmative with no particular content — a little kid’s argument might go “ja!” “nein!” “doch!” in the way that English speaking kids would say “yeah” “nunh-uh” “uh-hunh!” So this line says “There is yes uh-hunh! no other not who can fight for us.”
I’ve been thinking about that line lately, about the way it makes my brain run back and forth trying to make it make sense. It mimics how it feels sometimes when I’m reading words — especially words about the political landscape –– that look like a language I know, but describe a world I can’t recognize.
I love words, and I believe in their power to illuminate the truth and to connect us — to each other, to ideas, to our own better selves. But, like all two-edged swords, they can also obscure the truth and divide us from what is good. It is good to know to whom we can turn when words stop making sense — “unser Gott alleine.”
