KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 23 April
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil”
“April is the cruellest month,” T.S. Eliot says at the beginning of his poem, The Waste Land. He is playing on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales which invokes April as a time of pilgrimage, of rebirth and renewal.
We find ourselves, I am afraid, in a wasteland here in Nova Scotia after the rampage of madness in the mass shooting that has killed so many people in one of the rural parts of our province. It is heart-breaking and shocking, a reminder of the radical nature of evil. We confront dark and difficult things. How do we face them?
By being recalled to who we are in the sight of God. “The deepest longing of the soul is for that which is greater than itself,” the great Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus teaches (3rd. cent. AD). Such an idea has its roots in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle and carries over into the spiritual imaginary of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions of the Mediterranean cultures and from there into Europe and beyond. God “governs us as masters of ourselves,” Aquinas observes a thousand years later. It is when we forget or deny such ideas that we become empty. Such is nihilism out of which comes such mindless madness, desolation, death and destruction that has turned Nova Scotia into a wasteland.
Yet providentially, it seems, the lessons in Chapel this week speak to these dark and difficult times. Psalm 23, the so-called Shepherd’s Psalm, begins with the idea of God as Shepherd. “The Lord is my shepherd.” Jerome who translated the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek New Testament into Latin (4th/5th cent. AD), actually provided two translations of the Psalms into Latin, one based on the Hebrew, the other on the Greek Septuagint resulting in “The Lord rules me” or “the Lord shepherds me.” Aquinas wisely notes that “He who shepherds, rules,” a profound image about the true exercise of power that is not about domination and destruction but about building up and caring for those whom you “rule” or better “shepherd.” A lesson for leaders everywhere.
The two Latin versions vary in another respect. One speaks about walking in the midst of the shadow of death, the other in the valley of death. Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Psalms became an English classic and has remained embedded in the classical Books of Common Prayer. With a wonderful poetic sensibility, Coverdale joined together valley and shadow to produce the memorable phrase, “the valley of the shadow of death.” We all walk through “the valley of the shadow of death,” to be sure. But the psalmist says “I will fear no evil.” Why? Because “thou art with me.” Who? God. The Lord. And that makes all the difference.
