It was about 11 am on Monday morning when the telephone rang.

I was beginning my third week as a student chaplain at the Masonic Home for Adults, and for the first time, I was the chaplain on call for the day. My first scheduled official duty was to say grace in the community dining room before dinner, which was to be served at noon.

I was going back over the prayer I had written, hoping it would be suitable.

This was a community of Protestant Christians. Mind you, on the subject of religion, Masons do not specify any religious affiliation for members. Anyone who is willing to profess a belief in God is welcome: Muslims, Jews, Christians of all stripes. But in fact, this was a community of Protestant Christians. My supervisor, a Lutheran minister, explained to us that for the residents of this community – this parish, as it were – religion and Masonry and patriotism were entwined so closely as to be nearly indistinguishable.

The combination was familiar to me from my childhood. It felt very much like the northeastern Ohio suburb I grew up in. These people felt very much like the neighbors I knew in my childhood, like the parents of my friends.

And now, I was here for the summer to serve as their chaplain. To say grace at mealtimes; to visit residents in their homes and their hospital rooms; to sing and pray with residents who were struggling with Alzheimer’s; to listen to their stories and their worries, their questions and their fears; to invite a gentle probing of the ways in which they felt supported or alone, reassured or frightened, confident or worried about their present life and their prospects for the future. A Unitarian Universalist student in this Masonic-Protestant-patriotic mélange.

As Unitarian Universalists go, I am quite comfortable with Christianity, though it is no longer my first religious language, and I am not really fluent. So a Grace – a public prayer – posed a particular challenge. For me, prayer is a practice of letting go of my own expectations and designs for the way the world should be unfolding, and coming to accept and embrace the reality of what does happen – in me and around me. This was clearly not the norm here. Here, prayers were addressed directly to God, and consisted of thanks for gifts and requests for blessings. My first concern was respect for the beliefs and practices of these people whom I had come to serve, and to learn from, and who welcomed me graciously into their home. With some trepidation, I welcomed the challenge of adapting, with integrity, my own practice to accepted practice. I wanted to offer a suitable Grace.

“Spirit of Life…” I began.

The telephone rang.

It was a message from a nurse in the Skilled Nursing Facility. One of the residents was anxious and agitated. She wanted to talk with a chaplain. Would I go?

I set the Grace aside, and called my supervisor to check in before heading out for my forst pastoral visit. I confessed that I was a little nervous, and she reassured me. “Just take a Bible with you,” she advised. “Read the 23rd Psalm, and the 121st. Those will be comforting.”

A Bible. Psalms. I went to the bookshelf, took down a Bible, and looked up those two Psalms. A Unitarian Universalist from the age of 10, I had not grown up with the Psalms. My Presbyterian Sunday School classes had focused heavily on the childhood and teachings of Jesus. But I had studied the Hebrew Scriptures in a class in seminary; I knew where to find these verses, and something about what scholars and academics said about their history. I looked them up, and read them over, marking their places in the book. The 23rd I recognized: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” The 121st was less familiar, but I knew the beginning of it: “I will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help.”

I lifted up my eyes to the hills, rising gently just outside the window. I took a deep breath, and set off.

We talked, and I did read the Psalms, and indeed, they were comforting.

These two Psalms became staple fare in my visits with bed-bound, ill, or hospitalized residents that summer. Because these Psalms, and certain hymns, and certain prayers, were familiar and comforting, I read them and said them and sang them many times during that summer. And always, at first, I paid close attention to the words, and whether they were appropriate for the occasion, and whether or not they expressed my own beliefs – either directly, or in some interpretation that would make sense to me, and that would encompass, or even broaden, the traditional meaning.

This questioning, this careful attention to the meaning of the words we use, is very much in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, and all the time I was doing it, I was mindful of a comment I had read in a sermon by Unitarian Universalist minister Lynn Ungar. She quotes “the old joke that explains that UUs sing so badly because we’re always reading ahead to see if we agree with the words.” Isn’t that just what I was doing, in singing the old hymns, in reading the old psalms?

There was another woman whom I visited frequently. Largely bedridden with painful knee and hip joints, she was also struggling with difficult news of a daughter newly-diagnosed with a dangerous, painful illness. Discouraged, she asked me to read to her from the Bible, and I paged through the Psalms, scanning the words, looking for one that might offer hope and courage. I tried the 40th, and began reading… “I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.”
She stopped me, then. “I think I’d rather hear the 23rd Psalm,” she said softly. And as I began to read, she reached for my hand and closed her eyes and recited with me: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

And that’s when I got it.

It was not about the words. Not the mealtime Grace, not the Psalms. It was not about the words they used or didn’t use, not about the way the spoke about, or spoke to, your own situation, your own predicament, your own pain or joy. For this woman, for these people, raised in Protestant Christian homes where Bible readings were staple fare in church and children were put to memorizing Bible verses and prayers, and the same hymns were sung week after week, year after year…for these people, the old familiar scriptures were most of all, first and last, a link with their own past. The first words had a power beyond thinking and reasoning, a power that took them to a place where they were no longer old or sick, no longer alone or frightened; a place where they were young and trusting and safe.

And so it was important that I was there, saying those powerful words out loud, holding her hand, looking into her face, sharing the moment. Letting her take those words in as a child would: hearing them, feeling them. In that contact and that connection came reassurance for a woman who fighting off discouragement, came comfort for a woman who was agitated and anxious. And in that contact and that connection came, for me, an awareness of a truth far deeper than any analysis of Lords and Shepherds and Valleys of the Shadow of Death could ever reveal. A truth of common, and timeless, humanity.

For the Psalms are, first and foremost, poems. Probably written to be sung as hymns, these ancient poems speak to the heart, speak of truths that are truer than fact, broader than culture. And the truths of poetry are not literal but metaphorical truths, and the language of poetry carries an echo of that universal language of the human heart that Waldemar Argow names as religion [in today’s Call to Worship, reading #647].

This 23rd Psalm speaks to us of a world that each of us knows in our deepest being, a world that religions have come into being to help us to grapple with, and to live in. A world in which, from time to time, we feel as helpless as sheep, as deeply in need of the protection and guidance of a shepherd. A world in which, again and again, we feel alone and frightened, threatened by wild animals and by enemies. A world in which we yearn to be provided for and protected by a Lord in whose house we shall dwell forever.

And this 23rd Psalm speaks to us not only of a world but of a human being that we recognize, one whom we see in the distant image of a Hebrew shepherd-king whose metaphor of sheep and shepherds reflects the culture he knew best, and also in our own most vulnerable moments. Waldemar Argow called it “an eternal verity [that] abides beneath diversities.” I call it a truth of common humanity, that strong and delicate thread that enables us, here today, to participate in the fear and the joy of a Hebrew poet who sang of his – or her – faith and hopes 3000 years ago and half a world away.

A truth of common humanity, even though we live and learn as individuals, beset by the wolves at the doors of our own souls, haunted by our own individualized enemies. For these two women who were my teachers that summer in the Masonic home, these poems opened a welcome and comforting door to a personal past in which that safe and protected world for which we yearn had seemed real, or at least attainable. In the recitation of Psalms, in the holding of hands, a child-like trust reasserted itself. Lines etched by pain or worry eased from troubled faces. Anxious bodies relaxed into ease, or sleep.

Perhaps this Psalm works in the same way for you. It does for many – for Bobby McFerrin, who hears in the Psalm the loving care of his mother. For Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, perhaps best-known as the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, who in his 2003 book The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the Twenty-Third Psalm, suggests that these “fifteen beautiful lines from a single page of the Bible [can] change your life…if you are willing to open your heart to their magic.”

Perhaps it does not work for you. I daresay that for some, this Psalm may open a door to a far less comforting past, may awaken haunting memories or conjure up fearful associations. And still, “every person’s hunger is the same.” Still we yearn for comfort and courage, support and safety. Still we are linked by that thread of common humanity, heart speaking to heart, hand reaching out to hand, so that some poem, some prayer, some anthem speaks to our heart, and changes our life.

It is the reaching, as well as the finding; the yearning, as well as the satisfaction that marks us as human. It is the recognition of our connectedness that makes the connections powerful enough to overcome loneliness and fear. It is our willingness to listen for the eternal truth, singing through the rhythm of an ancient poem, or the words of a hopefully-written Grace, beating in our own pulse or weeping in another’s tears, that confers upon us the blessing that we all seek.

May we take time, now, to honor that common human search, that Spirit of Life that breathes in each of us. May we settle into silence, knowing that even as we long for green pastures and still waters, so, too, do those around us, and so many more whom we will never see. May we listen with the faith of children, and may we be comforted.

The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out.

Bell
Silence
Meditation music

Amen.

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