When I get stressed out, I sometimes find myself asking, as did the Biblical prophet Jeremiah (8:22), “Is there no balm in Gilead?”
Admittedly, that would be in one of my more poetical moments.
In any case, this led to another query: “Do writers in today’s popular press still use this expression?” Based on years of compiling this column, I’m not entirely surprised that the answer is yes.
Unlike other Biblical expressions, which find wide currency among sports writers, I located nary a reference in this usually fecund field. Pride of place in this instance belongs to literary analysis, in particular book reviews.
In a USA Today analysis of Jan Karon’s Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good, the reviewer observes: “Mitford, NC, does not exist on any map of the United States—just in the gentle and warmhearted imagination of best-selling author Jan Karon … Father Tim’s Mitford is as welcoming as Andy Griffith’s Mayberry.” With this warm and fuzzy preamble, it is not surprising to find that “in a world that seems increasingly troubled, the kindness and civility shown in Somewhere Safe feels, as Father Tim would say, like a balm in Gilead. Somewhere Safe hits the sweet spot at the intersection of your heart and your funny bone.” Come to think of it, that’s just the spot I’m aiming for.
A New York Times review observes that Marilynne Robinson’s recent Lila continues in the line of her 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead. In fact, this work, also set in a small Iowa town of the same name, “might well have been titled ‘Balm in Gilead.’”
In contrast with these comforting and comfortable observations, there is Howard Jacobson, author of The Finkler Question, about whom a writer for The Scotsman opines: “It is the familiar comic burden of being Jacobson’s Chosen People that his Jews … should undergo angst-ridden self-laceration. There may indeed be balm in Gilead, but none here.”
Elsewhere, this Biblical expression also appears in helpful and hopeful contexts. In a New York Times story, titled “Teaching Psychiatric Patients Writing, and Hope,” the author notes: “A black spiritual, drawing on the prophet Jeremiah, has a refrain for this work: ‘There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole.’ Rabbi Benjamin A. Samson, the chief chaplain at the [psychiatric] hospital, has his own description: chicken soup.” Either way, anointed or ingested, it sounds pretty good.
We might well expect—and not be disappointed—to see the Biblical phrase from another perspective in business reporting. An unfortunate incident involved an industry leader about whom CFO.com queries: “Did the CFO Find No Balm in Gilead?” Not especially humorous—especially for the corporate officer who resigned her post “after only two months to pursue ‘another opportunity.’” But it is sort of funny, for this outsider at least, when we read that the biopharmaceutical company she was leaving was named “Gilead Sciences, Inc.”
Is that clear? Certainly it is in writing, but what about as a spoken pronouncement? For the final item in this column, consider the following from the Washington Post: “Back in the 1950s, Roger Hartman’s father was the choir director of his hometown Methodist church. Each week, he would phone in to the church secretary the name of the choir’s anthem for the following Sunday. One week, he phoned in ‘There Is a Balm in Gilead.’ Wrote Roger: ‘In that Sunday’s bulletin, there appeared—just as the secretary heard it over the phone—the choir’s anthem, ‘There Is a Bomb in Gilead.’” I don’t know about you, but I’m heading for the hills!
When I get stressed out, I sometimes find myself asking, as did the Biblical prophet Jeremiah (8:22), “Is there no balm in Gilead?”
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