The 23rd Psalm

Who among us did not learn to say the 23rd Psalm by memory as a child? Even now as an adult it is the one Psalm that seems most familiar even if it does not roll off the tongue easily from start to finish as it once done.

I have found myself often reflecting on the Psalm from the perspective of maturity. What was left on this reading was the verse about not fearing death. As a child I saw the verse through the eyes of a child and death I was being asked to not fear was my own. The idea of death was hard to under grasp anyway. There was a sense of finality and of loss but there was no clarity about what those things really meant. There was a sense of foreboding to think about walking through the valley of the shadow of death but no real understanding of shadows and death.

As we grew we came to understand that the valley referred to life itself because death is an ever present reality. To fear death was to acknowledge our own mortality and it was faith in God that was meant to free us from that fear.

Now there is more clarity. The death we were not to fear is not just our own death but also the death of others: our grandparents, parents, siblings, other friends and other family members and, most terrifying of all, the death of our children. The faith are granted through hearing the words of the Lord frees us from the fear of death, all death and not just our own. Faith is what allows us to endure the loss we find in the depths of the shadow and it gives the courage to step into the final journey of others.

Thirty five years ago on this day we lost a child, a son we named John. The sense of loss remains keen but any lingering fear about his death has long faded so deeply in the shadows that it no longer touches me.

What we once recited by rote but without full understanding still works for us today if we only we ask for faith. 

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for you are with me;
your rod and your staff comfort me.

He is with us. Always.