Alienated From God

Not where the wheeling systems darken, 
And our benumbed conceiving soars! - 
The drift of pinions, would we hearken, 
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors. 

The angels keep their ancient places- 
Turn but a stone and start a wing! 
'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangèd faces, 
That miss the many-splendored thing.
(Francis Thompson)

The ideas conveyed by this poem, 'In No Strange Land', are fairly simple and straightforward; that God and His kingdom are all around us and that it is our self-induced blindness not His absence that cause us not to see Him. In commenting about it, then, it is easy to fall into banal commonplace remarks. This though would be to do a great misjustice to the poet who was intent not so much to convey ideas as to share with us his deep anguish and suffering.

The reality which he and we experience is that of estrangement. One senses that he is speaking to us with his body all bruised and battered from repeated assaults against the prison door seeking by the strength within him to tear it open. He does not experience despair but he does know the taste of bitter failure. It is no consolation to him to know that it is he himself that shut, barred and bolted the door. Before it opens he expects to experience more anguish, more distress, more suffering yet.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder) 
Cry- and upon thy so sore loss 
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder 
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Only when he is at his most extreme end of pain, so sad that he cannot be sadder, does he believe that his eyes will be opened, the door will be unlocked, the light will infuse his being.

Again, there is a temptation to say certain things which are theological truths but which in this context appear trite. Yes, he requires to be fully converted, to repent, to do penance. And yes, even then it is by God's grace not by His own labours that he can hope to see the face of God in Jesus Christ. But we do not know the state of his conscience, like Job's comforters we may be sharing platitudes which miss the mark.

It may be that it is his vocation to throw himself passionately against a locked door and bruise himself. This, not as a punishment nor in order to gain a reward but just because that is God's purpose for him. If he sat in stillness and quiet awaiting the Spirit to descend he might be defying God's will. And others if they did not so sit but imitated the poet would in their turn be defying the Father's will since He does not have the same purpose for each of us.

King David was inspired by God to build a Temple for Him in Jerusalem. But having implanted the desire in David the Father then forbad him to execute it. It sometimes happens that we are moved to attempt the impossible and then fail. God is love itself, and God is justice itself but we are too limited to understand what these things in their fullness really are. If He seems unloving and unjust to us and we go on doing His will anyway because it is our greatest desire to serve Him then perhaps we can understand this poem a little better. And pray for the soul of poor anguished Francis Thompson.
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Martha, Martha.

In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul.
(Psalm 94:19)

Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful:and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.
(Luke 10:41-42)

Both David (the psalmist) and Jesus draw a contrast between the drain on resources caused by multiplicity and the peace to be derived from simplicity. David describes an internal environment and Jesus an exterior one but, of course the two are intimately linked.

Martha's busy-ness was concerned with the tricky task of being a good hostess for an horde of visitors which meant having to juggle several balls in the air at the same time. Mary was simply concerned about sitting at the feet of our Lord and learning from Him.

Anyone who has tried meditating will recognise David's description. Our body may be as still as Mary's but our mind is, like Martha, bustling around like a shuttlecock from one thing to another and, very often, back again. The key difference, though, is that Martha's activity is purposeful and useful whereas the thoughts rattling around inside our head are often neither. Both of the sisters are focussed on Jesus, just in different ways. A contrast is often made between Mary as emblematic of the contemplative life and Martha of the active one. This is true so far as it goes there is, however, what Al Gore would no doubt call 'that little known third category' where action follows contemplation.

Had Martha sat at the feet of Jesus before performing her hospitable tasks then her multiplicity would have been secondary to her simplicity. Not simply second chronologically but also she would have become in some sense detached from her actions, performing them diligently but with a part of herself still dwelling by her Lord. Because, however, she performed them as an alternative to listening to Him then her affection for Him and desire to hear His words were among the other balls she was juggling and not always appearing as the most important ones either. Nonetheless, focussed or unfocussed both Martha and Mary were primarily motivated by love of Jesus and  'love covers a multitude of sins.' (1 Peter 4:8)

What David describes is a mind juggling umpteen balls at the same time and a soul delighted by the comforts of God. As I mentioned in a previous blog (Repentance-Why Bother?) words change their meaning over time. The 17th century translators of the Authorised Version understood comfort to mean something different from what their 21st century readers might suppose. At its root is the same word used in fortress, fortification, fortified and the like. Literally it means "strong together" and would have been used in the sense "strengthen greatly." So David should be understood to be saying something like "In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy strengthening helps delight my soul."

Listening to Jesus would have given Martha strengthening help that would anchor her in simplicity whilst she was busily doing many different things. Her multiplicity would have proceeded from a unity and returned to it. By not listening she discovered herself to be in the midst of multiplicity longing for simplicity but without the strength or wisdom to find her way to it.

Something similar applies to our own 'multitude of thoughts.' Whether we are in contemplative or active mode without a divinely inspired core they will be diversity without unity. Thoughts will head off in all directions; sometimes they will collide, sometimes they will go down dead-ends and often they will just circle round and round and round.

Divine comfort, which is an action of the Holy Spirit, will nor necessarily stop any of that (although on rare occasions it probably will) but it will change the way we experience the phenomenon. We can be Martha's without the angst. This multitude does not possess the power to command our attention, all that it can do is request it. Hard as it may be to believe we do have the ability to refuse those requests. Letting thoughts pass us by without our focussing upon them is only an effort if we have nothing else to focus upon. And the Spirit giving 'delight to my soul' is a powerful counter-attraction.

The advantage that Mary possessed was that she was fully aware of the presence of Jesus. He filled her sight, her hearing, her mind and her heart to the exclusion of all else. We are seldom so obviously blessed.Yet, nonetheless, if we have made the basic decision of faith in favour of Christ and His Kingdom and if, where possible, we have been strengthened by the sacraments then He is a permanent guest within our own hearts. Only unrepented mortal sin can drive Him away from us. And if He is within us then we, if we listen (which is the one thing needful), can hear Him always. And that is a comforting thought.

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The picture is Christ in the House of Mary and Martha by Vincenzo Campi

Miley Cyrus & the Bible Scholars

                                               James Tissot 1836 – 1902

                        Michal Despises David

The dead do not praise the Lord,
    nor do any who go down into silence.
18 But we will bless the Lord
    from this time forth and for evermore
Psalm 115(113) 17-18

[NB I start with the scholars and work up to Miley, please be patient]

There is really no limit to the number of different tools we can use to analyse the Bible with. Paramahansa Yogananda, for example, in his Autobiography of a Yogi reads it from his perspective as telling us that Jesus and St Paul were advanced practitioners of Kriya Yoga. Muslims tend to see it as being the prelude to the Quran in the sense that the passages they agree with are inspired and the ones they disagree with are but human inventions. In the West though, since the 19th century the dominant analytical tool favoured by the intellectual classes is the historical-critical method. Essentially this looks at the texts in the context of the history of the societies that produced them. Using archaeological evidence and other artifacts from the same era it produces descriptions and hypotheses which explain the Bible in quite radically different ways from those of traditional Christianity which very often took the Scriptures at face value.

Knowledge is A Good Thing and facts are Good Things but the historical-critical method of the Bible scholars has its limitations. Firstly it is worth noticing the word I just used 'hypotheses.' Many scholars take the facts which they have to hand, weed out the ones they regard as irrelevant or doubtful, and weave around them a narrative which accounts for the facts they have chosen. This is reasonable enough and other scholars challenge these hypotheses posing alternative accounts instead. The problem here is that non-scholarly people, either perfectly ordinary human beings or journalists, can take one or other of these hypotheses as Gospel and assume it must be true because its based on science and science always beats religion. That is, they attribute to it a degree of certainty which the historian advancing it does not herself necessarily claim for it.

Secondly, academics make the prior assumption that all descriptions in Scripture which require Divine intervention or miracles must necessarily be either false or a radical misreading by the Bible authors of perfectly natural phenomena. God is excluded from the Scriptures as an active participant and reduced to the role of an idea which existed in the minds of the Bible characters. Again this is reasonable enough if you happen to be an atheist, agnostic or deist but those who think it plausible or more than plausible that there is a God and that He has intervened in human history will find this approach inadequate.

Christianity is not at war with truth. The historians have done valuable work in recovering data about the ancient world and enhancing our understanding of it. We have much to be grateful for in this, it enables us to understand the context of Scriptural events much more clearly than when we had only the Scriptures themselves to rely upon. We can accept the tools which they use and use them as well, some scholars in this field are also priests, monks or nuns, but this does not prevent us from using other tools as well, those tools provided for us by our faith and by two thousand years of reflection upon the Bible as a spiritual text and a record of God's revelation of Himself to humanity. Being a Christian does not deprive us of the works of scholarship but it enables us to give an extra dimension to them. In this context the historians are like people who cleverly and accurately analyse a photograph of Miley Cyrus. Everything they say about the picture may be true nonetheless they are doing something different from what those who report back on meeting with Miley do. Those who have had a personal encounter can talk about the sound of her voice, whether she is quick to laugh or not, what scent she was wearing and so on. A photograph is an inanimate object, Miley Cyrus is a living, breathing, dancing, singing person. And so it is with Christians and the Scriptures, they are not simply a record of stuff that happened long ago and far away, they are part of a living relationship here and now. The dead-record part of it is helpful so far as our minds go but not necessary to our hearts.

Which brings us to Psalm 115 (numbered as 113 in some Bibles) [NB don't worry I haven't finished with Miley yet] The historians inform us that at the time that this psalm was written the Jews had no notion of a general resurrection. Therefore the only people who could praise the Lord were those who happened to be alive so that this verse represents a straightforward bargain, 'if you want to be praised keep us alive.' The belief was that the dead descended to a dreary underworld, sheol, where they led a shadowy existence but took no thought for God or anything else. Whilst this may be an accurate description of the state of religion in the time of the Temple of Solomon it does not exhaust the possibilities to be found in our psalm.

The psalms are traditionally ascribed to King David. He is a very interesting figure, arguably the Miley Cyrus of his day given his propensity to dance half naked at important ceremonies (2 Samuel 6:14.) Like Miley he provoked severe criticism, in this case from his wife, Michal the daughter of Saul looked out of the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, and she despised him in her heart. (2 Samuel 6:16) Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David and said, “How the king of Israel honoured himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants' female servants, as one of the vulgar fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!” (2 Samuel 6:20) To which David replied "I will make merry before the Lord. I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in your eyes. But by the female servants of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honour.” And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her death. (2 Samuel 6:21-23)  

Now, the scholars in telling us about the absence of an ancient Jewish belief in resurrection in relation to our verse in Psalm 115 take as a given that we have a shared understanding of what it means to 'bless the Lord.' But do we? David's understanding of it led him to his near naked dance in front of the Ark of the Covenant and his promise to Michal to do more of the same. The reference to her childlessness gives us the contrast between the life and liveliness of blessing the Lord on the one hand and her dead womb from which no fruit can come on the other. That is, David has found in his personal experience a metaphor which he subsequently worked into his poetry. Poets do not always mean what they appear to mean when they use words and academic historians are not always well qualified to analyse poetry. Incidentally, you might think that it was a mean thing to curse Michal with childlessness just because of this but the Bible doesn't say that that is what happened.

Another contrast between singing and dancing as a form of praise and death as silence is to be found in the figure of Miriam the sister of Aaron and Moses.  Then Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and dancing. And Miriam sang to them: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.” (Exodus 15:20-21) This is in the immediate aftermath of the Red Sea (or Sea of Reeds) closing in on the pursuing chariots of Pharaoh after it had opened to allow the Israelites to pass through. There is, perhaps, something gruesome to the modern mind in the sight of women dancing and making merry over so much death and destruction, once cannot imagine Miley doing it for example. However the rejoicing is about life, not death. The army had the objective of annihilating the Israelites, without Divine intervention Miriam and the women around her would have died possibly after being raped. They are celebrating being alive and they are praising their Saviour. At first sight this is a straightforwardly neat fit with psalm 115 as the scholars interpret it but one explanation does not necessarily exclude another. Here it is worth noting that the author of Exodus reminds us that Miriam is a prophetess which invites us to consider her words and actions with more attention. Is there a prophetic dimension to her actions here? From the perspective of the sister of Aaron the priest and Moses the prophet and Lawgiver Miriam is well aware that the value of Israel does not consist of their bare lives as weighed against the lives of any other group of humans. Their extra-value springs from their covenant with the One God, they are the custodians of His revelation, they have a role to play being His ambassadors to the world. Only those within Israel are alive to God all those outside of Israel are dead to Him. Hence her song of triumph is not simply about the survival of her tribe it is also about the survival of the People of God, as long as there is such a People they will live and praise Him and as long as there are those outside this People they will be dead and tongueless before Him.

Christianity has another proposition to make which Bible scholars cannot go along with [NB I'm going to do some Jesus stuff here but more Miley coming up later] It is that the Old Testament should be read by looking through the lens of the New Testament. That is to say, that within the OT we can see in shadowy forms or prototypes the seeds of the revelation which came to full fruition in Jesus. The understanding which we can bring to this or that passage, such as our psalm verse, is based on what we now know and we are not restricted to interpreting it in the light of the beliefs that were held when it was written. Because, Christians would argue, the Bible as a whole was inspired by the Holy Spirit each part of the OT can be thought of as being multilayered. This means that it is possible for us to accept that David really did think that only those alive in the world could praise God and still argue that the Spirit intended us to understand it in a different sense to the way its author understood it.

An alternative explanation would have two parts. So far as the psalm relates to the pre-Gospel times it is strictly accurate. Those who died in the time before Jesus went into a sort of sheol-like limbo. They continued to exist but in a shadowy kind fashion, awaiting the time when Jesus through His Passion, Death and Resurrection would open the gates of heaven and lead the souls of the Just into the Kingdom of God. As things are now our verse acquires a new depth of meaning. Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead" (Luke 9:60) Clearly this means that there are certain ways of being living which do not equate to being alive. “But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment. And he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. (Matthew 22:11-12) The psalm links death to silence, here we have someone who is silent before the king. The Christian notion here is that those who refuse the wedding garment offered them have no place at the wedding banquet. They are dead to it although living and they are silent although capable of speech. By contrast, those who accept both the invitation to the wedding and the free gift of a wedding garment are alive and more than alive and they have hearts as well as tongues which both speak and sing.

While I was thinking about this blog I went for a walk and found myself wandering through the very large cemetery here in Exeter in the South West of England. It was a sunny day and I walked slowly past old barely legible gravestones from the century before last and recent memorials to those who have died in the last few years. My mind turned, as it often does, to my parents who are also numbered among the dead. It occurred to me then that there is yet another way to understand this psalm. Whenever I recall my parents, pretty much a daily event, I never fail to feel grateful that I knew them and loved them and was loved by them. They continue, in a sense, to be present to me as a blessing, a praise, to that source of life from which they came and to which they have returned. Only the beloved can live in this way. Those who go down into silence are those whose memories have no resonance of praise and thanksgiving. Those whom we forget or recall only with hatred are truly dead but the loved live for as long as we do which is, for us, forever. And it applies not only to parents of course. It may be that 70 or 80 years from now there will be no one living who recalls seeing a picture of Miley Cyrus but she will still live on in the faithful heart of a teenager of today who saw her, met her, encountered her, heard the sound of her laughter and the song of her voice. Death cannot eclipse a life in which love is present.

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Unbridled Lust

I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt:
open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it.

11 But my people would not hearken to my voice;
and Israel would none of me.
12 So I gave them up unto their own hearts’ lust:
and they walked in their own counsels.

13 Oh that my people had hearkened unto me,
and Israel had walked in my ways!
14 I should soon have subdued their enemies,
and turned my hand against their adversaries.

Psalm 81(80) 10-14

Blood, vengeance, hatred, war, cursing and much more to the same effect seem to form the staple content of many of the psalms. Indeed The Young Person (in the Podsnappery sense) whose only acquaintance with the scriptures was the Book of the Gospel and the Book of Psalms might be forgiven for thinking that they referred to two different deities and two different spiritual paths. Such a Young Person would be surprised and probably discomfited  to discover that the psalms form the very heart of the corporate worship of the Church and the private devotions of many Christians. Surely some mistake they might think what has 'gentle Jesus meek and mild' got to do with all this dashing of children against rocks? [Psalm 137(136)] To descend to the particular, I was that Young Person dear reader. It struck me that this ancient practice of the Divine Office which gave so central a part to Hebrew poetry was a legacy from a more barbarous past with which the Church was now saddled but which could profitably be sidelined by individual believers. Eventually, though, it came into my mind that perhaps in such matters the Church possessed better judgement and greater wisdom than I did. So, in a modified version of Pascal's Wager, I essayed the experiment of making the psalms part of my daily prayer life. Over the course of time, day after day, year after year, I began in a sense to sink through the bony surface of them and enter into their marrow, discovering great underlying themes and ideas which can only be seen from the inside looking out never from the outside looking in. I fell in love with them because in them I discovered love.

As an aside it occurs to me that something similar could be said of the Quran. Non-Muslims who have never read it in its entirety or only read it once or twice in a lifetime will understand it in radically different ways from those within Islam who read from it and think about it every day. They will discern things in it from the inside looking out which are truly there for them though they do not appear to be so for those on the outside looking in. Of course the parallel is not exact since, from a Christian point of view, I do not suppose that the Quran is Divinely inspired in the same way that the Bible is. However, many of the Surahs, perhaps those especially written during the Meccan period while Khadija, the first wife of the founder of Islam, was alive, clearly proceed from a more or less accurate apprehension of the Unity of God and the relationship that man should have towards Him. This means that a person with right intentions looking for right meanings within the book has a good chance of finding them though they may find other things besides. Anyway, I digress and probably offend large numbers of both Christians and Muslims in the process.

Psalm 81 (numbered as 80 in some Bibles) is in some ways representative of the 'difficult' Psalms. The verses under consideration represent a summary from God's perspective of the Book of Exodus or more paradigmatically of God's relationship with His people Israel over all of history. It seems to suggest that if they do what He tells them they will receive in return substantial material rewards and their enemies (and Israel never runs out of enemies) will get a sound spanking. On the other hand if they don't do what they are told suffering will ensue. It is plausible, even likely, that the psalmist (traditionally King David) understood the psalm to mean what it appears to mean. It is certain that many generations of Israelites understood it in that way. However people can be unconscious agents of a deeper wisdom than they themselves possess and Christians would argue that the Holy Spirit inspired David to write (and sing) something which has an altogether more universal and less materialistic meaning.

We should in some measure approach the psalms in the same way that Sherlock Holmes approached a crime scene. The available data can easily and quickly be assembled to put together a satisfactory narrative which explains meaning and motive. But the official narrative is invariably wrong and like Holmes we should be alert for the single thread in the tangled skein, the one clue that enables us to unravel the mystery, put the unimaginative literally minded Scotland Yarders to shame and discover that important truth which will serve the good cause. Here the clue is in that passage which gives this blog its (slightly mischievous) title So I gave them up unto their own hearts’ lust: and they walked in their own counsels. The enemy who defeats Israel is Israel itself.

The guidance which God proffered to the nation resolves itself into His presence dwelling in the hearts and minds of individual Israelites. This would be understood to be especially present in some individuals more than others, Moses, Aaron, the Prophets the Davidic Kings, but nonetheless present in all. Or, at least, in all who were willing to accept that gift, to "open wide their mouths."  When the gift was refused then the situation that our Lord later described became true For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. (Matthew 25:29) Those who found even the nominal acceptance of the Law and the restriction of worship to one God too onerous to observe were granted their desire to be freed from the lightest touch of Divine grace. Without this presence people wander bewildered in a material world which can only be understood in terms of material desires and passions. The purpose of this kind of life lacks any ethical base and consists of a cycle of trying to fulfill desires whose outcome is invariably unsatisfactory leading to continuous repetition often in ever more extreme variations. As another aside it is worth pointing out that by absence of grace I do not simply mean absence of an explicit religious faith. An ethical life can be lived apart from faith but not apart from grace which is the invisible action which prompts ethical choices in all who make such whether they are aware of its presence or not.

Using this clue we can recast and reshape the narrative present in the psalm in spiritual terms which harmonise very well with the Gospel. The Lord appears as a lover urging His beloved to accept His gifts of grace, His agape-

We have seen that God's eros for man is also totally agape. This is not only because it is bestowed in a completely gratuitous manner, without any previous merit, but also because it is love which forgives. Hosea above all shows us that this agape dimension of God's love for man goes far beyond the aspect of gratuity. Israel has committed “adultery” and has broken the covenant; God should judge and repudiate her. It is precisely at this point that God is revealed to be God and not man: “How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! ... My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst” (Hos 11:8-9). God's passionate love for his people—for humanity—is at the same time a forgiving love.
Deus Caritas Est 10- Pope Benedict XVI             

David moves on to tell us that Israel, the beloved rejected their Divine lover and would not listen to Him. Which is, of course, a generalisation on his part by which he means that the overwhelming mass of Israelites rejected God although a faithful remnant ever remained, as it ever shall. Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him. (1 Kings 19:18) Left without the guidance of pure love Israelites, and you and me, act in ways which are guided by its opposite. Love is always about others, about giving, about service. Self-centredness is about Me, about taking, about reaping what we do not sow and letting the devil take the hindmost.

The Almighty, who has voluntarily limited His own power to grant His people freedom, then laments that He has been abandoned. This lament springs not from a sense of what He has lost, what can God lose, but what we have lost by relying upon ourselves alone, by trying to be as gods ourselves. And what have we lost? His aid in our battles against those powerful enemies who kill our souls (and often our bodies too) here in time and also in eternity. The enemies whose names are  wrath, avarice, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony. Without His help they rule over us, the lesser has power over the greater, the body over the mind and spirit. With Him we can vanquish them and be as we should be, as Mary the mother of Jesus was.

It was not intuition that moved Sherlock Holmes to single out this or that fact from the mass and fashion his theory around it. He had a method, the science of detection. Christians looking at the psalms also have a method, the science of love. More specifically the lens through which we examine David, and all of the Old Testament, is the New Testament, is the figure of Jesus. By interpreting scripture that foreshadows the fulness of Divine revelation with the tools that that fulness gives us we can understand them as they are intended to be understood without pretending that they were so comprehended at the time they were written. Even so we can find that some psalms can range from 'difficult' to 'very difficult.' Holmes was an expert also on the history of crime. He was frequently led into the solution of a case by his previous knowledge of numerous similar cases. Likewise we have before us the history of 2000 years of Christian reflection upon the psalms. If we ourselves struggle to reconcile David with the Gospel then the fault lies not with the Holy Spirit who inspired both but with our own inadequate grasp of it. We should therefore turn to the commentaries upon those texts and their spiritual meaning which numerous saints and good Christians have written precisely for our benefit. There are also, incidentally, some modern commentaries based upon historical and textual criticism which seek to describe the psalms in purely mechanical ways as fitting into this or that cultic practice or crisis in Israel. These can usefully add to our knowledge of the history of the biblical epoch but serve no useful spiritual function. When we pray the psalms with the mind of the Church, which is the mind of Christ we can enter into them spiritually and the Spirit through them can enter into us and lead us into the Divine presence there to be fed with the finest wheat which is the Bread of Heaven, Jesus our Eucharist. He should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat:
and with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee. Psalm 80(81)    
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The Lord is my Shepherd

He leads me beside the still waters,
He restores my soul.
Psalm 23(22):2-3 Christian Community Bible

When a text or a song is very familiar to us there is a temptation to dismiss its content as clichéd, its use, as an expression of ideas or emotions, as hackneyed or sentimentalist. Or at any rate it is a temptation for those of us who have intellectual pretensions; forever on the look out for new, original ideas or previously undiscovered truths. Ordinary folk, on the other hand, at moments of great sorrow or great joy reach out almost instinctively to those texts or songs which have stood the test of time. They make natural companions to such moments because we can perceive if only intuitively that they speak to and from the heart of shared human experiences of the deepest kind. Here we see that the wisdom of the foolish exceeds by far the wisdom of the wise.

Psalm 23 can be dismissed as at best one dimensional and at worst a dreary depiction of a patriarchal, hierarchical religion. Yet if we come to it as new, discounting its familiarity, we can see within it the most profound of themes, the answers to questions that we did not realise we were asking. This certainly applies to the two lines which we are considering here.

He leads me. The late Christopher Hitchens, God rest his soul, had great fun with the notion of Christians as sheep. He, himself trenchantly resisted the notion of being such a thing himself. Rather ironically many other New Atheists in a thoroughly ovine way have followed where he led and use the term sheeple as an abusive term for believers. What they miss by looking at the sheep is the Shepherd in the same way that the idiot who looks at the pointing finger of the sage misses the moon. Christians begin by looking outward, towards the Christ. When we have seen Him, when we have recognised Him, when we have begun to know Him as He knows us who would not be His follower? We only recognise our littleness when once we have recognised His greatness. The Shepherd leads us first of all to Himself. Those who despise sheeple do not inform the surgeon that they will perform open heart surgery on themselves or the pilot that they will navigate the plane across the Atlantic. Where it affects their physical safety they will submit to any amount of authority and leadership. Where it comes to curbing their pride or recognising the limitations of their intellect in matters of the spirit then they will submit to no one or nothing, except indeed to their bodies and their bodily appetites. The choice, as always, is not between freedom and submission but about to what we shall submit.

He leads me. King David, to whom the psalm is attributed, was himself a shepherd. What he and his audience would have known without having to think about it was that shepherds lead flocks. Psalm 23 is couched in the terms of an interpersonal relationship but the subtext is that the shepherd is leading not just one but many. There can be too much emphasis on the notion of individual salvation. Jesus formed a community around Him, a community that endured, that became a Church, a community which still exists today. There are only two commands, He says, love God and love your neighbour as yourself. They are related commands. If we do not love our neighbour and desire for her what we desire for ourselves then self-evidently we do not love the God who died precisely to save that neighbour of ours. The Lord leads me but I can only follow if I consent to do so in company. The Lord saves me but I am only saved if I long as much for the salvation of others, and above all of my enemies, as I do for my own.

Beside the still waters. Those of us who live in temperate climates where rain is a frequent guest may not appreciate how it was that in the ancient Middle East water was simultaneously a necessity and a luxury. Its absence was always feared, its presence could never be taken for granted. When Jesus says he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous (Matthew 5:45) you might think that He is comparing a good thing with a bad thing. Not at all, the shining of the sun and the falling of the rain were both equally important for survival, they were, and are, both blessings. So for David the image of the waters is a potent shorthand way of expressing the presence of life, of abundance, of refreshment. The quenching of thirst is one of the greatest of physical pleasures, the ending of our spiritual dryness one of the greatest of  God's gifts to us.

Still waters. A traditional image for tranquility and also for meditation is that of a clear, calm, quiet lake or pond. It is a restful image, and one of the promises of God is to give us rest. A sabbath rest still remains for the people of God;  for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labours  (Hebrews 4:9-10)  This is a rest which we shall enter into fully only in eternity yet even now we can partially experience it. And stillness in the presence of the Lord is one road by which we can enter into it. Ceasing from activity, from discursive thought, leaving aside our anxieties of the day and being still, placing ourselves before God in a patient, thankful waiting is such an experience of rest. The still waters too are a perfect mirror, they faithfully record what is above it. Our stillness is an opportunity to open ourselves to the image of the One who is above us, to become His mirror to reflect Him to Himself and to our neighbours and to carry that image with us wherever we may go.

Beside the still waters He restores my soul. The key factor is, of course, the shepherd. He could restore my soul any time He chose and in any place He chose. Yet our attention here is drawn to the combination of His work and the place where this takes place. The material setting plays a role in the spiritual regeneration. This is a fruit of the Incarnation, of God becoming Man. Material objects are not so many barriers to our spiritual awakening but rightly used and in the company of the Good Shepherd they can be so many superhighways precisely towards achieving it. The bread and wine of the Eucharist becomes not only the Body and Blood of God but His Soul and Divinity also and that not despite being material but because His Divine Spirit and His Body are inextricably and eternally linked as One. So, likewise material things, the sound of sacred music, the sight of sacred art, the cool shade of a lakeside arbour can be so many aids or helps to our Lord as He proceeds about the business of restoring our souls.

He restores my soul. It is important to grasp this truth- We cannot heal ourselves. We can break ourselves, certainly, but we can't put ourselves back together again. Co-operating in our healing is necessary of course but it is not sufficient. Psalm 23 points us to the healer and gives us images of the healing. Recognising that we are lost is a good beginning to the process of being found. Without Him we cannot come to the waters, we will not find refreshment, our soul will not be restored. Unless we realise that we are thirsty we will not drink. Without Him we cannot know that the answer to our restlessness, our darkness, our pain is to be found in the water that streamed from His spear-pierced side on Calvary. The water that restores my soul is the water of baptism.

Restores. Restoration implies a return to a previous condition. When David talks about restoring the soul perhaps he had in mind a return to the pre-lapsarian condition of Adam and Eve, the story of whom is a useful vehicle for summarising Man's loss of innocence and subsequent  alienation from God. But we live in a new dispensation now. O Felix Culpa sings the Church, O Happy fault which won for us such a great Redeemer. Our second state is better than our first. If we accept Christ as Lord and Saviour then our condition is infinitely superior to that of our first parents. How much superior we can see above all others in the figure of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. If her Son is the New Adam then she is the New Eve. Jesus is superior to Adam by nature, He is Divine as well as human, Mary is superior to Eve by Grace, she is fully and only human. It is in the nature of things that every creature will have one among their number who is best of all that species and most fulfils the potential inherent in them all. So it is with Mary, she fulfils to the uttermost limits of fulfillment all that humans can be of compassion, love, gentleness and devotion to God and neighbour. She is that mirror which most clearly reflects the Son. She is us as we should be. She is the restored soul par excellence because more than restored, O felix culpa, and no one, no one, is closer to Jesus than she. If we would follow Him then we must stay close to her and we cannot go astray.

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Pointless Images

36 Bend my heart to your instructions, not to selfish gain.

37 Avert my eyes from pointless images, by your word give me life. Psalm 118/9 (New Jerusalem Bible)

In an era where English was used in a more elegant fashion the translator might have written "incline my heart" or possibly "sway my heart". What is at issue here is a change of direction in our life's journey and our willing acceptance of a guiding force or power to be the focal point of our heart compass. To talk about a heart swaying is to acknowledge the always real possibility of first bending one way and then bending back upon oneself to return back whence we came, and beyond, upon the road we so need to abandon. To talk of an inclination is to consider that whatever weaving goes on the final destination towards which we aim remains constant. Simply to bend suggests the adoption of an awkward and difficult to retain posture. Which may not be entirely inappropriate for the plea that David is making here is for assistance in doing something that we cannot do ourselves alone.

The word "heart" is rich with meaning and evocative power in the context of Sacred Scripture and Christian tradition, the Orthodox talk of "prayer of the heart", the Catholics of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Blessed John Henry, Cardinal, Newman chose as his motto cor ad cor loquitur, "heart speaks unto heart." The heart is the true centre of a person. It is their essence, that within them which points always towards the true, because it is always itself true. In fact, the mystics would say that it is God Himself since only He is ever true and pointing towards truth so that our own heart, the wellspring of our individual life, is God. He is within as well as without. This would mean that heart speaking to heart is not two hearts but one which nonetheless in a divine paradox is not a monologue but a fruitful dialogue. The mystery at work here is that of a unity of being containing a multiplicity of persons. We are each within God and He within us so that we are one. We are each created uniquely by the One to abide within Him in just the fashion that we are suited to and no other. Our individual personhood is not lost in unity, it is fulfilled.

When David, then, talks of our heart being bent by God towards God He is not referring to that in us which is always inclined in that direction. He is talking of the imagined heart, the simulacrum of a heart, that we create and establish as a pointless image for our eyes to gaze upon and our desires to follow. This is ever bent in an awkward posture since we have created it, however unconsciously, with the express purpose of turning ourselves away from the light which disturbs us and towards the gloom where all is cool and not at all challenging to our sensual desires. In a sense he is asking that we be un-bent.

To the contemporary mind bending to instructions conveys the unpleasant, apparently pointless, image of the individual exchanging freedom for servitude. Of all the illusions we cherish that of absolute individual autonomy is perhaps the most precious to us today. We demand our rights a hundred or a thousand times before we place the same pressure on ourselves to fulfil our obligations. Or, at least, we appear to since the world only functions as well as it does, and we within it, precisely because so many of us fulfil our obligations and discharge our duties a hundred or a thousand times more frequently than we evade them. In truth most of us most of the time do the right thing because it is what the heart impels us to do even while our head, our vain imaginings, pushes us in a different way. What David is praying for here is just this, to unite our thoughts and our imagination to our heart. The instructions we seek are the words which will express to our mind what the heart already knows to be true.

It is, nonetheless, the case that when we come under these divine instructions that we constrain our actions or potential actions and must do real violence to our desires for selfish gain. We embark upon a path of struggle. It is a commonplace of spiritual writers to say that in service is our real freedom but we cannot pretend that this is any other than a freedom which is experienced as a constraint, a gain which feels like a loss. The wound that Original Sin has made in our natures allows us to desire as good things that which harms us and to experience as harms those things which are good. This is why David calls upon the assistance of the good God to make this submission to instructions, without Him we cannot follow the path that leads to happiness. He it is that strengthens us to see that submission, service and self-forgetfulness, those paths that lead away from the pursuit of moment to moment pleasure, is the one road that leads to happiness.  If we seek pleasure alone we do not seek happiness, if we seek happiness who knows what pleasures we shall find along the way?

Among the distractions from that one road which assail our heart are those pointless images of which David speaks. It may be a metaphor for the things which blind the eyes of the heart, but, there are too very many actual images, pointless and aimless, which attract and hold the eyes in our head. It is an often used cliché, sometimes employed even by the fiercest of those partisans of absolute individual autonomy, that we are "bombarded with images". And it is true but not the whole truth. Frequently, daily, hourly, we choose many of those images with which to bombard ourselves. We choose what pictures will distract us. We choose what images will strengthen our resolve to commit actual sin and give us new and varied pleasures of selfish gain. It is not a wholly free choice but a choice it certainly is. Whether it be the Shopping Channel or the Pornography Channel it is a means to reinforce the inclinations we wish to reinforce and drown out the heart voice that calls for us to gaze upon that beyond images which contains all images as realities. The Children of Israel rebelled by creating out of their own resources a Golden Calf to worship. I heard an Anabaptist theologian defining worship is "giving your undivided allegiance to". Like the rebellious Israelites we also give our allegiance to what we produce out of ourselves which is a roundabout way of giving our allegiance to ourselves alone. They are pointless images because they are as insubstantial as our own ego's which a moments careless driving or a day's illness can destroy utterly.

So what we need is life and, moreover, a life which will endure the greatest of traumas and disasters and triumph even over the apparently final drama of death. David asks for that single word of God which is life itself. He did not know what that word was when he asked for it. He did know that there was just such a word and that God would one day speak it and liberate His people by it and through it. And He did. The word is Jesus and praised be His name.