It Begins with a Hush: The 23rd Psalm 1

The LORD is my shepherd . . .

How do we live life well?

Many years ago, I committed the 23rd Psalm to memory. I repeat it to myself almost every day. Like any work of great art, its meaning deepens the more I look at it.

Recently, Life with a capital “L” has taught me the meaning of the first word in the Psalm.

Most of the old farmers in the rural neighborhood where I lived did not go to church like my family did. They did not talk about God like my family did. But, sometimes they would, with a kind of hush in their voices, say something about “the Man Upstairs.”

Back then, I thought that it was too bad people didn’t know God like I did.

In my old age, I am less comfortable slinging the word “God” around. It should be said, if it is said at all, with a hush in the voice. Even a circumlocution like “the Man Upstairs,” should be said like those old farmers said it — like you don’t quite know what you are dealing with when you refer to You-know-Who.

In Hebrew,The 23rd Psalm begins with a hush. It begins with YHWH — the name of God that Orthodox Jews never pronounce. Indeed, they will write the English translation, “G_d,” as way to create a hush on paper.

Another way to do that is use the word we translate as “Lord.” In Hebrew, “Lord” is “Adonai,” which is what pious Jews say when they read the letters YHWH aloud. If you take the vowels of Adonai and put them with the consonants, YHWH, and make the “Y” a “J” and the “W” a “V”, you get “Jehovah.” Not the word “YHWH” but a word that refers to YHWH because YHWH is too holy to say.

In a previous post, I wrote disparagingly about “spiritual speakeasies” — people who know all about heaven and the afterlife. But, as one of the pastors of my youth used to say, “When you point your finger at someone else, three are pointing back at you.”

No one talks about G_d and makes more pronouncements about G_d than a preacher. I cringe to remember all the things I used to “know” about G_d that I felt free to yammer about in front of a congregation.

This sad summer taught me to be a lot less certain about those pronouncements I made. Those old farmers knew more about G_d than I did because they knew that they knew a whole lot less than I thought I did.

My Dad sold our farm the year I graduated from high school and went off to college. I did a lot of farm work before that: milking cows, feeding chickens, tossing bales of hay on to a wagon, cleaning calf pens, tossing frozen chopped corn out of a silo at 5:30 AM on a January morning. But, that’s only half the job. The other half was worry. I heard my Dad, my grandfather, my uncle, older cousins, all talking about it. Spring came too soon this year, or too late. There was too much rain in May and June, or not enough. Something was eating the corn. That hailstorm flattened the oats. The price of milk is falling.

They weren’t superstitious. Some of them had ideas about phases of the moon that were good for plowing – stuff like that. We are learning that some of that folk wisdom is not completely crazy. Most of them were like my Dad. They read Successful Farming magazine. They talked to the county extension agent about how to rotate their crops. They weren’t stupid, by any means.

Like all of us, those guys were hard-wired to see trouble coming before it arrived. That’s how they and our ancestors survived the randomness of life’s threats. Your tractor could roll over or your barn could catch fire — death or bankruptcy could arrive any day. They certainly didn’t control the wind and the rain.

When these guys talked about “the Man Upstairs” they kept their voices hushed partly because . . . well, you weren’t sure, exactly, what was next.

Obviously, they didn’t think life was all random. They sowed oats and corn in the spring because the summer sun and rains would produce a harvest in the fall. How big a harvest depended partly on them and a lot on . . . You-Know-Who. When the harvest came, they knew it was a gift as well as the result of hard work.

The 23rd Psalm is attributed to King David, who famously started out as a shepherd boy. He knew what those old farmers knew about the mystery represented by those letters, YHWH.

In its first sentence, the Psalm makes an assertion about this mystery. It asserts that those four letters point to a mysterious reality that cares about us and cares for us — like a shepherd.

Maybe.

I hope so. But, right now, I’m still standing in front of that first word. I don’t want to limit it, trivialize it, or pretend that I can define it. To do any of those things is to break the second commandment: “You shall not take my name lightly.”