'How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?'

When I was a teenager, my family moved overseas. At the time we moved, I was a hopeless romantic. I had a faith (I was brought up in the church) but it wasn't one I had to cling to, it just came naturally to me. I was also used to interacting with the Australian natural environment - I had a kind of romantic relationship to it. Just before we left, I went to the local market and bought an oil burner and some orange oil to burn in it. I would turn off the lights or close the curtains, and light the tealight candle, and warm light in the shapes of moons and stars would pattern my bedroom walls. There was magic in that dim, warm light and in the warm scent of orange oil. In the move overseas, my bottle of orange oil leaked, and perhaps the burner broke, because when we arrived in our new country, I bought both a new burner and some peppermint oil. The magic had somehow been left in Australia though. I had bought the peppermint oil because it was supposed to be calming, so perhaps I was already experiencing some anxiety about starting over in this new, strange land. I would lie on my bed, smelling the cold peppermint, and willing myself to feel that old magic, but my sense of panic would just escalate. I couldn't understand how the difference between orange and peppermint, or a mere geographical shift, could so alter my once magical experience.

It was in this strange land that I had my conversion experience (despite already being a person of faith) and became a bit of a fundo. I had come across the idea that one has to make one's own decision regarding faith, and be 'born again'. I had lost that natural, easy, magical faith I had as a child and younger teenager forever. And the landscape (or skyscape) in this new place troubled me. The sky was almost always grey, and even when it was blue, it had a kind of vacant look. By comparison, I think the Australian sky seems always possessed by something or someone, utterly full to the brim with a deep blue, or with sunshine, or with cloud or rain. I always knew God was 'in' the Australian environment. I remember asking a friend in the 'strange land' whether, given that God was everywhere, and God was therefore in the sky, and God loved me, you could actually say that the sky loved me. She looked at me like I was a lunatic! (and perhaps I was getting unwell. My last doctor believed that during this period I was experiencing the prodrome to my illness). To put it simply, I felt that God was absent. Perhaps my new fundamentalist faith was an attempt on my part to grasp and cling ever more desperately to the God who had gone so thoroughly missing from the places I usually found Her.

My delusions have always been about parallel worlds, about there being one 'good' or 'normal' world and one sinister world. Once I even had the delusion that in one world Christ had been born and died and in the other world, He had not. There is an undeniable logic to these delusions.

Before coming to this realisation, that God seemed absent in the parallel world where the Australian sense of 'possession' was absent, where there was only a small, vacant sky, I didn't really understand the psalm the title to this post is taken from (Psalm 137:4). Of course God is everywhere, in every land, however unfamiliar, I thought. On reflection now, I know exactly what the verse means. The physical is imbued with the sacred. When you lose the natural environment that your God has permeated, to some extent you lose (or lose sight of) your God.