“Green Pastures and Still Waters, A Soul Restored”: Food for the Journey, But Not as We Will
third in a guest series by Myles Werntz on Psalm 23 and the moral life
This is the third in Myles’ excellent series on the moral vision of Psalm 23. If you missed them, here’s Part 1:
and Part 2:
If you’re not already, sign up to follow his substack, Christian Ethics in the Wild, here. And check out his recently published books, as well (both published this year by Baker Academic: From Isolation to Community: A Renewed Vision for Christian Life Together and A Field Guide to Christian Non-violence (co-authored with David Cramer).
The moral life begins, as we have seen, with God, the One who is. The One who is neither slumbers nor sleeps, nor does he lack: he is the One who watches over Israel, the one who already owns the sheep on a thousand hills, and has no need for our offerings. In the One who is, there is no necessity or compulsion: there is only the fullness that is God. And in this One, we find the object of our desire; we are creatures who endlessly desire, and in the presence of the LORD, we learn to desire well.
Ethics is not eternal, and belongs to the pilgrimage of life, and it is here that ethics finds its good home. And so, affirming the things above belongs to a different task than ethics: theology professes what is true, while ethics asks in what ways it is true. It is one thing to say that the LORD is our shepherd, and another to ask what the presence of the LORD means for a hungry people who labor without end.[1] Squaring this circle—how live as those who profess the satisfaction of the LORD, but are not yet satisfied—has been a matter of great debate among Christians concerned with the moral life. For some, this vision is an unreachable ideal, important for the criticism it makes of our present aspirations. For some, this vision is a call to build not only houses and gardens within the city, but to build the city itself.
In the Shadows of Scarcity
Behind us is the shadow of desire, and in front of us is the Valley of Death’s Shadow, the barren place, and in between, the claim of abundance. And so the contrast between fullness and scarcity attends the sheep. The sheep are those who trust in the abundance of the LORD, and do so in the long desert, who wish for the city to be a place of refuge and find only closed doors.
The claim to the provision of the LORD is one which is contingent, within time, even subject to time’s felicities: provision comes through many hands before it reaches us. The manna in the wilderness, the full jar of flour, the angel’s voice: these are the exceptions which prove the rule that the provision of the LORD is most frequently ordinary, interlaced within time to the degree that we no longer trace the breath of God as anything other than the natural texture of the grass.
Within the cities, the grass is an anomaly, forbidden to be wild, manicured instead of feral. In the cities, Ivan Illich writes, we create self-justifying needs: buildings that require different ground, different ground that requires new technologies to produce it, new technologies which require us to adopt them and conform our lives to them. In the cities, then, it is not that we are not satisfied with the grass, but that we cannot remember what the grass was even for.
But one need only drive outside the city for the spell to break. This is no paen to the rural life; the ground of the countryside is both unforgiving and fertile, powerless and all-giving. But it is these lands of the pasture which makes the civic glories of Ninevah possible, the disavowed homeland of the kings and the proving ground for the sacrifices of the altar. It is the pastures and their waters which sustain the cities, the sheep who bear witness to the abundance of the land and consumption of the cities.
The Problem of Wanting the Pasture
If, in desire, we find that our wantingness is a gift which makes the moral life possible, it is the offer of pastures and rivers which puts before us the problem of the will. Before we can receive the pasture and the stream as our provision, we must be led there, and to be led there requires us to not just desire it but to act upon it. The flock is not compelled as goats, but led as sheep, and led as ones wanting to be led. Where our wills come from is a mystery, and whether a will which is free is proper to us as creatures remains debated. For Augustine, the only will which is proper to us is one in which not following is not a possibility; for others, the possibility of not following is a risk entailed within creation.
Without the will, what we are as creatures remains morally obscured. But it is unnecessary (and impossible) for us to do anything with pure altruism, as if we ever only willed the good because it was good. We desire to leave Egypt both because being enslaved is bad and because God is good; to make our wills so conformed to the good is to ask humans to have inhuman kinds of wills. God’s work upon humans, we see here, is one of providing for humans in humane ways: drawing our appetites to that which is good without requiring them to not be appetites. We must be wary of desiring a provision more pure than God’s, of having a will less creaturely than the One who took on flesh.
We are led into the pastures and by the waters, not out of compulsion, but by appealing to what we are as creatures. That our wills attach themselves to falsehoods is not uncommon, and thus, sometimes setting the will free for good things requires that idols must be laid face first within their own temples. Such collapse feels to us like a compromising of the will, a compulsion, but only because our will is attached so painfully to a false source of the stream. The will is not a matter of reason alone, but of love borne into the world in ways which are reasoned. Those who consider the will to be a matter of emotion, buttressed by reasons after the fact, are half-right: we are creatures who hunger and thirst, without apology, seeking out gifts which look like needs less than gratuities. But there are many ways to meet a need, and it is reason which sorts through them, knowing that the grass beyond the city is better than that which lies in the city’s safely managed bistros.
To those who say that our will, freed to follow the LORD, leads us to seek safety likewise misunderstand the provision of God here. The provision of God, in the fields and beside the stilled waters, do not bear marks of having been freedom from precarity, but in precarity’s shadow. The meadows are the unruled spaces beyond the walls, the waters stilled only because there was first the great Tehom, the great foaming waters which the Spirit first made quiet. To know the LORD’s provision is to distinguish between the food which we eat with our enemies around the corner, held at bay for today, and that which allows us to feast on our enemies, subdued and dashed against the rocks of the river.
The Problem of Wanting the Pure Pasture
If our desire for an unvarnished will presents one challenge to our receiving good gifts, the desire for a pure gift is another, more subtle challenge: that we desire a better provision than the ones God gives. For the temple was built on plundered gold, the tabernacle adorned with Egypt’s wealth, and the footstool of the Lord with the memory of the Hittites barely in the ground. As Lauren Winner reminds us, all the gifts of God come to us fractured, appropriate for people in a fractured world; it does not mean that God gives fractured gifts, but that in the world, the gifts we receive pass to us in a dry world through calloused hands, harvested in imperfect love.
This is the first temptation, in many ways, to be unsatisfied with anything short of the food which makes us like the LORD in ways inappropriate for us. But to feast of the LORD’s giving is not only for our provision, but our perfection here: manna and quail require us to humble ourselves accordingly to receive them, setting aside leeks and onions that we might eat of the food suitable for the desert. Once in the hallways of the LORD, we will feast, but here in the fields, the food of the feast has no table and spoils in the sun; to ask for what we cannot yet consume is not only foolish, but to desire vice instead of slow virtue. We are people on the way, and what food we are given is the food which we can now eat.
In time, and only in the midst of time, do we learn to love that which is good. We learn to love that which is good not because it is safe, but because it is true, though not only true. We learn to love that which is true because it is from the LORD, but not only because it is from the LORD. We learn to eat the provisions of the LORD, not in idealized safety, not without mixed motives, and not without contemplating the vanities of the city and the lingering shadows of the Valley ahead. We eat as sheep, because we have need, and because the LORD provides, and through that act, we learn to love goodness because it is good.
[1] In the Kingdom of God, it seems, there is no need for side-hustles, for gig economies, or for passive streams of income. For the rain falls on the just and unjust, with the just collecting only what they need that the water which is given for all might be distributed to all in the manner of their need (Acts 4:35)