“The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want; fresh and green are the pastures where he gives me repose; near restful waters he leads me to revive my drooping spirit.”
Not many of us know how to be a shepherd but most of us know what it is to walk in a valley of darkness.
The landscape of that valley – its depth, its contours – will be as varied as our lives, but walk through it each of us will, at least once. You who are there know what I mean already; and, if you don’t, prepare yourself: it will happen.
That valley can be illness, or the death of a loved one or the approach of one’s own death. It can be depression. I have a relative who lost two children to still birth in the 1960s: that loss has never left her. And when my grandmother died aged 100, I found a photo of a child in her prayer book – a child I had never seen before. “That’s your aunt” said my father. So great was the pain of her death that her name was never uttered again.
But the valley is not just about those ultimate experiences. I once asked a psychotherapist what was the most common symptom he witnessed. “Put aside the classic mental illnesses, which are rare enough, he told me, and the thing most people tell him is that they feel disappointed. Disappointed at themselves, their faults, their careers, the way their children turned out, the way life turned out. That’s first. Then, a sense of having failed. Broken marriages often create this.” And he went on to say that people are saying these things to him in therapy, earlier and earlier in their lives.
I wonder what it is for you? Ask yourself: what is my experience of darkness? Where within me do I feel personally, its dark, misty, frightening presence?
“If I should walk in the valley of darkness …”
Nearly all of us could take out the “if”. There are no “ifs”: it’s a fact of life.
Perhaps that is why this psalm – The Lord is my Shepherd – is by far the most loved and quoted of all 150 psalms. Maybe that is why it’s just about the most popular and frequently quoted part of the Bible: because it tells the truth of how we feel – some of the time.
Now if you look around our society, you won’t find a whole heap of compassion – real compassion – for these feelings. You won’t find much sympathy with any form of failure. All the benchmarks are about success, and any failure is pounced on. It’s easy for that type of mentality to influence religion. What I mean is, to think that religion is really only for the successful, those whose lives are together, who are walking upright along a straight road. And to bat-squeak that if you are not together, or sinless, or standard or normal, you have no place here. Indeed, some faiths have emerged that cater specifically for the successful Christian.
Catholicism has never been one of them: we have always been the religion of the sinner, the wounded, the fallen, and the refuge of those who feel themselves to be “in the valley of darkness”. If you are one of them, the Catholic faith is your home. Because only God can know or judge the secrets of men’s hearts.
There is a message of hope here for us. Because this psalm tells us about what God is really like – and those to whom he is drawn: not to those whose lives are together, but to those whose lives are complex and complicated but who know their need of him.
Aren’t we inclined, sometimes, to think of God as a terrible judge? Wanting to catch us out and march us to the guillotine? He is not. He is the shepherd, guiding, comforting and nudging us, but never losing faith in us however weak we may feel our faith in him.
Perhaps that is why this psalm is chosen to be read or sung at almost every funeral I have ever celebrated. As a reminder, that whatever trajectory life has carried that human since they were a baby, whatever the twists and turns that life has delivered, the merciful Good Shepherd remains true. And all will end well because all will end in him.