This is not the voice of happiness, the sigh of pleasure, the sound of delight. No, here in the 137th Psalm, which comes about eighty percent of the way through the Book of Psalms, most of which honor and salute God, comes this most tragic of psalms, a psalm which solidly stops us in our tracks, no matter where we may be.

We pause almost against our will, for who wants to hear this psalm's raw, naked, electric pain? Who wants to suffer the sobs and wails and moans of the Israelites who have been exiled from their beloved land and who are now adding their tears to the waters of the rivers of Babylon, a land where they don't want to be, a land where they're forced to be, a land which will become extinct long before various States of Israel rise -- again and again -- phoenix-like from the dry, holy, troubled crescent-shaped land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean?

Who, indeed? Seventy-five curious, serious ICJS members, who met for five Tuesdays in May to poke through not the psalms of pleasure, the psalms which everyone knows and everyone delights in and finds comfort in, but the psalms of lament, the psalms of fear and anger and despair, the psalms of looking at the bleak, dark underside of life, the psalms that come from grief that is palpable and sorrow that is tangible and yet, despite it all, from a faith that is still deep and pro-found and indelible and almost incorrigible in its dogged, mulish persistence.

People came to study with Rosann Catalano (who is also not unknown for her mulish persistence) because they knew she wouldn't shy from this undercarriage of faith, that she had such consuming fidelity to her own Roman Catholicism and such deep, profound respect and knowledge for all the other Christianities -- and, of course, for the Judaism that makes up half the ICJS's mandate -- that she would safely guide them through this world of laments, a world where there are no illusions. We intuited our emergence on the other side not just with faith intact, but faith enhanced.

"The lament is a courageous art," Rosann said, "because it requires admitting where we are." And that is the height of bravery. It's easy to celebrate God when everything is soaring splendidly, as it must have for David when he wrote that he was giving . . .

... thanks with all my heart;
I will sing praises to Thee before the gods.
I will bow down before thy holy temple ...
On the day I called Thou didst answer me;
Thou didst make me bold with strength in
my soul.

But the psalms of lament require a faith deeper, quite possibly, than David's, whose life, on the whole, was quite golden. These psalms demand salvation; they beg for redemption; they plead for reconciliation between Israel and God. They reach out, in their plight, to a God who the Israelites-in-exile knew was still ever-present and manifested a wisdom that was unyieldingly majestic, even if it was incomprehensibly beyond them. For if they had fully understood the ways of God, they would not have despaired quite as much and been miserably certain that, in effect, a mistake had been made and they did not deserve to be in this land of the Babylonians and estranged from their Temple in distant Jerusalem.

The word "redemption" has its root in the Latin redimere, "to buy back." For the ancient Hebrews, "redemption" (which, of course, was not the word they used; instead, they employed the Hebrew word, go’el) meant buying back a kinsman who had fallen into slavery or been taken prisoner or repurchasing his property if he'd forfeited it because of poverty. "Redemption" never applied to salvation from sin. So, to remain faithful to the original, go’el-ish idea of "redemption," studying the psalms with Rosann did not redeem me. It could not have. I'm neither slave nor prisoner and have a house too plentiful with pos-sessions (some of which I wouldn't mind forfeiting). But nestling up to the psalms put pain and despair in perspective. While that won't necessarily minimize my sins (which are also plentiful), it could minimize their power to hobble my spirits and morale. For I am not in physical exile. Nor do I weep by the rivers of Babylon. The fear, though, is that like anyone else, I might be in spiritual exile from God. And for that, I will have to seek my own salvation.

Arthur J. Magida is the author of four books and a weekly columnist and contributing editor for the on-line religion magazine, Beliefnet.com. For 2000-2001, he will be the Uni-versity of Baltimore's writer-in-residence.