There are famous words, and very famous words.  Psalm 23 offers the latter.  One of the best known and most beloved of all the 150 songs in the Psalter, this one is at once familiar and strange:  Strange because it mixes two powerful images (shepherding, or rather being shepherded, and feasting); strange because its very concreteness (grass, gloomy valleys, sloppily poured wine, confounded enemies witnessing the psalmist’s triumph) masks a grasping for the indescribable and even unimaginable peace of which we humans dream; strange because whatever comforts we find in the text also expose our ordinary pursuits of security as the flimflam jobs they are.  It’s a gorgeous little psalm, really.

The main abstraction here, of course, is the first word: YHWH.  God, the object of our most passionate longing, escapes quantification or even representation.  Hence the Bible’s flight to metaphors of all sorts to capture something of the elusiveness of the divine.  It is as though the piling up of images, sounds, and smells will allow us to begin to feel the presence of God and then to understand (rather than the other way round).  We speak of ourselves as well-fed sheep safe from wolves, bedded down on soft grass.  We speak of death (not the “shadow of death,” as the older translations have it, but “gloom” or “deep shadow” caused by overhanging cliffs in the narrow ravine), not as a menace, but as a transition still marked by safety.  We speak of social triumphs like meals in which the formerly dishonored and oppressed are honored.  These bits and pieces of our own lives seem, somehow, to be the best ways of speaking of life eternal and life with the Eternal One.  And so it goes.

I thought about this psalm this week as I ran, or sometimes stumbled, from one meeting to another.  What things — tangible, palpable things — signify the presence of God.  What do Christians feel when they believe God to be present?  For me, the sounds of music betoken divine help: Bach and Gregorian Chant, yes, but also Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn.  The sun shining in my office window, the pine trees just beyond the glass, the birds flitting from limb to limb.  For a Christian, the perseverance of such things, the beauty of life itself point to the creator.  I do not mean that they prove the existence of the creator.  Perhaps the cosmological argument really has fallen on hard times.  But they do help us experience the divine because they remind us that God is beautiful, as well as holy or powerful or all the other attributes that fit the definition of the abstraction “God.”  By thinking of myself as a cared for sheep or a guest at a large smorgasbord, I grow closer to God.  Who would have suspected it?  The psalmist did, and we do, too.