At the End of Hope:  The Communing God of Psalm 23

Choose one's traveling companions well. Physical strength and prudence are necessary. Imagination and ingenuity are our finest traits.
Expect anything.
You can change your mind like the weather.
Patience is more powerful than anger. Humor is more attractive than fear.
Pay attention. Listen. We are most alive when discovering.
Humility is the capacity to see.
Suffering comes, we do not have to create it.
We are meant to live simply.
We are meant to be joyful.
Life continues with and without us.
Beauty is another word for God.

-Terry Tempest Williams

The journey through this land of suffering and beauty and in this time of fear and doubt, as Terry Tempest Williams suggests, requires “imagination and ingenuity”.  This imagination and ingenuity, however, does not mean that suffering no longer comes or is not real.  As Williams writes, “Suffering comes, we do not have to create it.”  Confronted with deep suffering, confronted with events that are horrific and cruel, how do we continue to have hope?  The answer, or perhaps non-answer, comes in the last stanza, “Beauty is another word for God.” Here is God.  Not a god of abstract or absolute power, but the God of beauty, goodness and truth.  If we are to have hope then, we had best examine what god it is in which we have hope.  And what of those times when one gives up hope?

Strange things happen when you give up hope.  Strange things happen when you cannot see any way through that doesn’t involve disaster and catastrophe on all hands.  Strange things happen when all you can see is your children living on the streets or worse, your spouse suffering, and the injustice in our world ending in world destruction.  Strange things happen when you allow the whole weight of the mess we are in—the loss of crop land, climate change, the desertification of whole areas of the world, the endless conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Darfur, the insistence on speeding up the destruction of human community and global warming by our addiction to things fast, faster and fastest; and to things convenient and comfortable.  

This radical loss of hope, this moving into despair, can be debilitating.  It can mark the deepest and most destructive moments of depression.  When a society or a human being is gripped by hopelessness, it can embrace self destructive behaviours and destroy itself.  However, this loss of hope can bring us to the shores of a new way of being in the world.  By destroying all false hopes, that technology will save us or some simple application of an idea or a formula, religious or otherwise will give salvation, we begin to see more clearly.  In Hebrew scripture suffering is never denied, injustice is not easily overcome and the people are not automatically saved.  There is always a required change, a real loss and an unexpected twist in the story. God does not prevent disaster, but responds by offering strength, new vision and accompaniment.  Freedom is real, scripture suggests, and therefore things do go wrong, but God does not abandon the people.

In a remarkably spiritual book for one who is avowedly “agnostic” entitled “Endgame,” activist and environmentalist Derrek Jensen writes:

When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there's a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that “they”¬ and those in power¬ cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you're dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell¬ you can still live because you are still alive, more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died. (Endgame)

As troubling as Jensen’s words might be to those who read scripture superficially, they are closer to the theological understanding of Hebrew and Greek scripture than many of the glib Christian tracts on hope.  Jensen without the theological language suggests coming to a new understanding of self and world that is very much like that of the Christian mystic and the prophets. It is the spiritual place Thomas Merton writes of when he calls for a move from the false self that hopes in the solutions of popular religion and culture:

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered….Ultimately the only way I can become my (true) self is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence. Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. (New Seeds, 34-35)

But in what can we hope?  What is this hope beyond hope, this hopeless hope, this dark night that leads to a resurrected hope?  Who is this God of the true self?

When Psalm 23 is read with a full awareness of its Hebraic nature, it points the way to this God of the true self.  However, it too has been read and seen to support a false vision of hope.  It has been read through the sham of a religion and culture that depends on the easy answer of violence and the violation of the truly human. The central image of “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . .” should be disturbing for those who hope in the false gods of technology, violence, and the tribal religion of scapegoats and fear.  The root of this word translated as “shepherd” reveals something too often overlooked.  Its root carries meanings that have to do with companionship, accompaniment and friendship.  While guiding and protecting are also implied, the root word is inescapable in its implication of companionship.    Sadly, we have not often heard the implications of the Psalm.  It is often recited as a sop for the sentimentally pious that touches nothing of the grief and depth of suffering known in our world.  One might say that perhaps some find comfort in these words, but is this not a false and illusory hope?

From where does “real hope come” and in what is the true self rooted?  The Psalm by implication names as false those gods who do not befriend, accompany and stand with those who suffer.  These are the false gods who had and have all the answers and are untouched by the pain and the fear of the world.   These are the false gods who could have stopped all suffering, but allow it to exist in order to teach us some kind of lesson.  These are the false  tribal gods (Ba’al, Molloch etc.), who pick only a chosen tribe for blessing and allow those not chosen by their whim to suffer and be destroyed.  These are the false gods Rene Girard calls the gods of a “mimetic desire” that requires a sacrificial victim to be elected and a cycle of violence to continue, in order that some might be saved.   These are the false gods who have predetermined the outcome of every event, and thereby are responsible for every evil and every wound.

The psalmist sings “The Lord is my shepherd . . .” It is of ra`ah (ra`ah) Shepherd the Psalmist sings. And the root word ra’ah introduces the God who dares communion and befriend humanity. Even where the Hebrew word Melek (מֶלֶכְ) or Royal/King is used in Psalms, the model for this is David.  With a Davidic theology of Kingship—and the continued resistance to the idea of “Kingship” that also exists in Hebrew scripture—the king is to be responsive and a friend to the people. The King is not absolute or above the people, but rather is the servant of the people, the one who is to bring God’s justice and compassion to the people.  The difference between Israelite understanding and the surrounding peoples’ understanding is too often lost on us.  The idea of the divine king in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Sumer is alluded to in Hebrew scripture, but it is always transformed by the understanding of God’s relationship with the people.  Although Hebrew scripture may borrore is a two-way relationship between God and the people.  God responds to the situation in which the people find themselves.  Hebrew scripture and theology introduces a new way of reading human history.  It is a history not predetermined except for ongoing faithfulness to God’s vision for the people.  God will act, that even from the ashes a people will arise.  But this people and the pattern are changing, and God responds to the change.   

Seeing the shepherd imagery in its context rather than in our own imagination is not easy.  The layers of pious misreading all but obliterate the implications of seeing God as a nomadic outsider who accompanies goats and sheep in the wilderness.  The shepherd was in fact at the opposite end of the social scale from the Potentates and Kings of the Ancient Middle East, and having God appear in such a form was by implication a challenge to the cultural norm.  The shepherd occupied a class of persons outside the hierarchical patterns, a nomadic and even sometimes distrusted thief or shady character.  These nomadic herdsmen were not regarded with respect.

Psalm 23 uses the Hebrew word ra`ah (ra`ah) “companion” or “shepherd.” It does not talk of a Divine Tyrant or a Holy Dictator.  It does not suggest an all powerful and uninvolved ruler who keeps his subjects in line by the murder and execution of a scapegoat, or who causes the innocent to die in pain and fear simply as a demonstration of his power.  A good shepherd is one who cares by tending to the sheep and calling to them.  A trusted companion is not one who plans our destruction, or orchestrates our pain, but rather one who gives us encouragement and a call to follow after.  

Theologically, the great tragedy is that we do not believe in the God who is our companion and shepherd.  We do not seem to understand the spiritual meaning of a God who is crucified, who walks with the people, who is raised up and calls the people forward. Rather we have hope in a deity that uses violence, fear, pain and suffering as weapons against all people.  Rene Girard has named this God of fear an illusion in the operation of  a society that encourages imitation as a socializing force, and elects victims to be sacrificed in order to prevent mass violence .  His anthropological arguments show the depth of this cycle of imitation and violence. It is why things are in such a mess.  That is the rule used in mass society, manipulating desires and fears by creating victims, and using the threat of violence to keep order.  It is this “scam” that Thomas Merton names as the big lie that we internalize, and thereby create a false self.  When we lose hope in this mass violence and this internalized lie, we are on our way to new life.  When we lose this hope, we may be resurrected into a new life.

We must cease to believe in the god of violence and fear.  We must refuse to have faith in such a destructive fiction.  This god is not the God of Christ, of the Gospels and of the Prophets.  This god is more like Zeus or Caesar, a god that operates without real connection to the people, without love.  The God who is a companion and a shepherd, and is known in the suffering of the crucified Jesus, is a God who communes with us.  The God  known in Christ calls us to act against suffering, injustice and the abuse of power.  Such a God is the God that is the shows truth of our dependence and need for one another.  Such a God reveals the truth about a world that is broken and has evil within it. 

The God who is a good shepherd is not the all powerful tyrant so many fear or worship.  Raw power is not worthy of our worship or faith.  Raw power has no love, no care and no compassion.  We cannotput our hope in raw power, for it has no compassion.  The God known in Christ is the God who places before us such a beautiful vision that we are lured towards a deeper compassion and a more beautiful way of being human.  Hope?  Hope in what we have not yet seen in popular religion and culture, hope in a God who communes with us and risks all in love.

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