Reflections from Psalm 23

Below is my chapel talk that I gave to the students and faculty at the Stony Brook School. I really wanted to say this, but I'm not on too good terms with the administration, so I went for a more orthodox approach. (Posting a chapel talk? So much for the group blog idea...)

Many of you have asked me what life is like for a single teacher here at the Stony Brook School. Though it is often phrased a bit mockingly: “Why don’t you get a life, Michael?” or “You need to get a girlfriend instead of sitting in your apartment all night,” it might be phrased, “You don’t have to change diapers at night like almost everyone else, so what do you do with your free time?” My hobbies, reading, writing, and running—yes, I do really enjoy these activities—all take considerable time, and as any teacher here can tell you from experience, there isn’t really any free time the first year of teaching. So in the twenty minutes that I find here and there, I read blogs. For those of you who don’t know what a blog is, let me clarify: A blog is a website that is regularly updated with articles. I peruse dozens, whose subjects range from education, theology, design, literature, or even, in the case of one of my favorites, graffiti and street art in cities across the world.
Yesterday, I stumbled across a discussion of the recent American Idol special, “Idol Gives Back,” a benefit show to raise money for causes around the world. From what I understand, at the end of the show eight of the remaining contestants sang the song “Shout to the Lord.” Apparently, the folks at American Idol, afraid to offend, decided that it would be better to substitute the word “Jesus” for “Shepherd” because the contestants sang, “My Shepherd, my savior.” The alleged secularization of the song didn’t bother me at all, but I was surprised that “Shepherd” was deemed secular enough. The Bible, after all, is filled with many references to God as a Shepherd, perhaps the most popular of which is the 23rd Psalm, which we heard yesterday in the lectionary reading. When I hear the word Shepherd, my mind generally darts to that passage: “The Lord is my Shepherd.” But I have, you might say, a difficult relationship with the Psalm.

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My father died when I was eighteen—my freshman year at college. In mid October, his stomach started to hurt. He was dead three and a half weeks later, a victim of cancer. He had spent the last week and a half of his life in our family room, wrapped in a blanket in front of the TV, barely speaking or eating. My sister had taped several Bible verses on the walls. Much like Psalm 23, they were encouraging verses, and my sister believed that if we prayed hard enough, if we believed the verses well enough, my father would live.
When I buried my father, my uncle, my father’s older brother, read Psalm 23. “The Lord is my Shepherd.” As a sniper in World War II, my uncle had faced the cruelties of war, even spending 6 months in the hospital after a German mortar destroyed the French theater that his tank battalion was occupying. Now he struggled to mouth the words of the Psalm as he wept bitterly. The Psalm was read again a couple hours later at my Father’s memorial service. “The Lord is my Shepherd.” I sat silently in the front row, too numb to think about the meaning, too numb to hear any words of comfort.
The next few months went very poorly. Of course, I was at Wheaton College, the Protestant Vatican, so there was no shortage of people to remind me that God would care for me. But I didn’t know where God was. I tried to find Him, like a boy trying to swat at a thick fog with a stick. As the great Polish Catholic poet Csezlaw Milosz wrote:
I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked you, you know it well, that the statue in church
lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.

But there was no miraculous sign. I thought God had abandoned me. In my “small group”—an odd phenomenon of the Evangelical sub-culture in which people share far too much of their lives and then talk about Jesus—I would sit silently, declining to pray with the others. I was alone. I plummeted into a deep depression and swore off God. But as John writes in the first letter, “for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart.”

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I think that one of the most powerful moments in the New Testament occurs in the Gospel of John. After many of Jesus’ followers have left him, he turns to the disciples and said “Do you also wish to go away?” Peter responds by saying, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Like Peter, I did not know where else to turn. By the grace of God, I eventually returned to my faith. I did not know why God had allowed my father to die, nor did I suddenly feel filled with happiness. I did, though, find my faith deeper and stronger, and I found that I was able to empathize with others who were suffering.
God does not bring about our pain intentionally to achieve his will, for he is perfect and is Love and need not...no, cannot...create evil to bring about some greater good. But he can use it if it should occur.
There is something redemptive in suffering, as the lectionary reading from 1st Peter Chapter 2 makes clear: “For it is commendable if a man bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because he is conscious of God. But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.”
In suffering, we learn to humble ourselves—willingly or unwillingly—just as Christ humbled himself to the point of a “death reserved for slaves.” In suffering we learn to empathize with others, to stop offering platitudes or catchy phrases or simple answers and instead, to listen. In suffering we learn that happiness is fleeting, but that the Lord can give joy in the midst of turmoil. But suffering can also be dangerous.
W.H. Auden said in an essay on Søren Kierkegaard that “the Christian who suffers is tempted to think this a proof that he is nearer to God than those who suffer less.” This is a peculiar temptation, the temptation to look upon others who may not have encountered difficulty and almost scorn them for living inauthentic lives. This was a temptation I have fallen prey to repeatedly. This is wrong. If suffering is to be beneficial, I think we must bear it humbly and meekly, not calling attention to ourselves or assuming that we are somehow more attuned to life than others.
Since autumn, I have spoken with many of you about suffering in your own lives. Some of you never had a father. Others have lost loved ones. Others have suffered the crushing weight of depression or anxiety.
It would be too easy to tell you that, in this lifetime, things always turn out for the best, that you may suffer now, but eventually you’ll be flourishing. Several years after the death of my father, I still sometimes struggle to believe the Psalm, to believe that God is constantly caring for me and looking out for my good.
This past summer , I buried two of my best friends, both committed Christians, both victims of suicide. I was studying on a fellowship in Berlin this summer, and I paused one weekend to go to Dresden to meet my friend Stephen, with whom I graduated college . We spent the weekend walking around the beautiful city, now rebuilt from the horrendous devastation that allied bombers wreaked upon it in 1945. On Sunday, after church, I took a train back to Berlin. Stephen, who was studying in a town called Gottingen, never made it back. I learned of his death a few days later when the American Embassy called to ask if I knew any details.
I came to Stony Brook in August, still grieving his death, though I don’t really think I had processed it. After my first day of teaching, I returned to my apartment wondering how I would make it through the year. I was greeted by a phone call from the mother of Luke, another of my best friends. A victim of bi-polar disorder, he, too, had battled depression for years, unsuccessfully attempting suicide a few times. During the week before I began teaching, I had spoken with Luke almost everyday as he spiraled further and further down. That Friday I called his parents to say that he was doing very poorly and that they should be watchful. On Monday, his mother called to say that “we had lost Luke.”
Let me be perfectly clear: I do not wish to convey the message that life is bad, that it is just a matter of riding out a long storm in which we are buffeted by wave after wave of hardship. No. Life is beautiful and holy. Though it can be difficult, life must be affirmed vigorously and joyfully.
There are, though, countless cases of people like this, people whose life seems to be marked by tragedy. The countless victims of disease or poverty who never see the rosy, halcyon days that we think are promised to us. And many are Christians. Where is the Shepherd, watching over his flock?

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Over the past few months, I have spent several hours talking with the parents of each friend. Both couples acknowledge that the great pain and destruction caused by the death of their sons—it will decrease over time but it will never disappear. At least on this side of eternity.
And this is where we must return to the end of Psalm 23. It closes with the beautiful declaration that we “will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.” The idea of eternity is difficult to grasp. Indeed, I doubt that we can grasp it. We can try to graph it, to mathematically represent it—the curve forever approaching the limit of infinity—but we are hard pressed to understand, even imagine eternity, let alone an eternity with God, an eternity of perfect joy. But this is what we are promised. In the face of such incomprehensible joy, the struggles of this earth fade away.
The hope that we have in Christ is too much for me to communicate. I, a mere teacher, cannot do justice to what the Psalmist so beautifully describes. I can only gesture at it, and repeat the closing words of the Nicene Creed: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”