If you use the Revised Version you will see the changes upon the
Authorised which it makes, following the stream of modern critics and
commentators, and which may thus be reproduced: 'Passing through the
Valley of Weeping, they make it a _place of springs_, the rain also
_covereth it with blessings_.' No doubt the poet is referring here to
the actual facts of the pilgrimage to Zion, No doubt, on some one of the
roads, there lay a gloomy gorge, the name of which was the Valley of
Weeping; either because it dimly commemorated some half-forgotten
tragedy long ago, or, more probably, because it was arid and frowning
and full of difficulty for the travellers on the march. The Psalmist
uses that name with a lofty imaginative freedom, which itself confirms
the view that I have taken, that there is something deeper in the psalm
than the mere external circumstances of the pilgrimages to the Holy
City. For, he says, 'passing through the Valley of Weeping, they make it
a place of springs.' They, as it were, pour their tears into the wells,
and they become sources of refreshment and fertility.
But there are other kinds of moisture than tears and fountains. And so
he goes on: 'the rain also' from above 'covereth it with blessings'; the
blessings being, I suppose, the waving crops which the poet's
imagination conceives of as springing up all over the else arid ground.
Irrigated thus by the pilgrims' labour, and rained upon thus by God's
gift from heaven, 'the wilderness rejoices and blossoms as the rose.'
Now, translate that--it scarcely needs translation, I suppose, to
anybody who will read the psalm with the least touch of a poetic
imagination--translate that, and it just comes to this. If we have in
our hearts, as our chief aim, the desire to get closer to God, then our
sorrows and our tears will become sources of refreshment and fertility.
Ah! how different all our troubles, large and little, look when we take
as our great aim in life what is God's great purpose in giving us
life--viz. that we should be moulded into His likeness and enriched by
the possession of Himself. That takes the sting out of sorrow, and
although it leaves us in no morbid condition of insensibility, it yet
makes it possible for us to gather our tears into reservoirs which shall
be to us the sources of many a blessing, and many a thankfulness. _He_
puts them into His bottle; we have to put them into our wells. And be
sure of this, that if we understood better the meaning of life, that it
was all intended to be our road to God, and if we judged of things more
from that point of view, we should less frequently be brought to stand
by what we call the mysteries of Providence and more able to wring out
of them all the rich honey which is stored in them all for us. Not the
least of the blessednesses of the pilgrim heart is its power of
transmitting the pilgrim's tears into the pilgrim's wells. Brothers! do
you bring such thoughts to bear on the disappointments, anxieties,
sorrows, losses that befall you, be they great or small? If you do, you
will have learned, better than I can say it, how strangely grief changes
its aspect when it is looked upon as the helper and servant to our
progress towards God.
But that is not all. If, with the pilgrims' hearts, we rightly use our
sorrows, we shall not be left to find refreshment and fertilising power
only in ourselves, but the benediction of the rain from heaven will come
down, and the great Spirit of God will fall upon our hearts, not in a
flood that drowns, but broken up into a beneficent mist that falls
quietly upon us, and brings with itself the assurance of fertility. And
so the secret of turning the desert into abundance, and tears into
blessings, lies in having the pilgrim's heart.