Turn Thou Us

Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.

The chapter it closes is an inventory. Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us. Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand. The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick. Nothing in the list is exaggerated and nothing in it is answered.

Look at the direction of the traffic in the prayer. They do not undertake to turn. They ask to be turned, and the second half is a consequence rather than a promise: and we shall be turned. They have already admitted whose fault the ruin is, without softening it. The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned.

Then the book ends. But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us. That is the last verse. Nothing follows it and no answer is recorded. The discomfort is old: when Lamentations is read aloud in the synagogue, verse twenty-one is repeated after verse twenty-two so the reading does not stop in the dark. The printed page is unchanged by that, and it is not the only page like it. Psalm eighty-eight closes with lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness, and stops.

So pray it as it stands. Turn us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned. We cannot do it from this side. We are not bringing anything that would move you and we will not pretend otherwise. Renew our days as of old. We are asking from here, tonight, with the list still true.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 119 is Everlasting Joy (Isaiah 35:10).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two