“Though I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow”: Death and All of His Friends
fifth in a guest series by Myles Werntz on Psalm 23 and the moral life
Death is All Around
The finitude of the moral life—that we live our obedience in the land of the living—is because, long before we encounter Death in fullness, we live in Death’s long shadow. We live, as William Stringfellow put it, amidst the powers and principalities of Death, all of which operate to draw us into death as quickly as possible. But identifying these are not so simple, and with them, the dangers to the moral life come from multiple directions. These powers of Death, he writes, appear under the guise of opposites which are only opposites. The libertine and the moral rigorist have both abandoned the grace which might raise us up to new life; withdrawing from public witness against injustice, and melting the goods of the temple into new weapons for the culture war both lead us to Death.
It is here that I wish we could say that keeping the via media, the golden mean of virtue would keep us in the way, avoiding all the ways into Death’s shadow. The point here in naming Death’s friends is not to comfort us that, if we simply stay with the LORD-Shepherd that we will be immune to death: following the LORD leads us firmly into Death’s shadow. As the Psalmist reminds us, even if we stay with the LORD, Death will find us. The moral life, lived on the path led by the LORD, is approached by these minions, offering a better path through Death’s woods, but Death will find us all.
So, why a moral life at all? Why let our lives be anything other than pleasure, accelerating the dissolution? If the moral life belongs to the shadow of Death, what of it then? Do we live raging against the dying of the light, as the shadows encroach upon us? Perhaps—if what we mean by this is not that our acts make the world into its resurrected perfection, but rather that through our actions, we leave marks upon the world which, in the words of Dorothy Day, make it easier to be good. For in this, our actions endure beyond death in a different way: as testimonies to the LORD’s enduring presence, of the coming resurrection of all flesh, of the land of the living in the valley of Death’s shadow.
The moral life is not one, as we have said, which is infinite in act, but infinite in its effect. To say that we continue to exercise the moral life eternally is to say that we, even in the presence of God, continue to make moral judgments. But our judgment at the end of all things, we are told, is tied to whether we have known the prisoner, the naked, and the hungry: the time for judgments will end even if the echoes of those judgments sounds on. It would be to be invited into the wedding feast and refuse the garments to say other than this: the moral life has its time—the time of now—though it sets our stage for when there is no time left.
Death’s True Threat
Prayer, Karl Barth writes, is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world. Put differently, it is the beginning of how we walk through the valley, not enduring the dissolution of the world, but by bearing in our bodies the power of the one who has been resurrected. The church fathers describe this as the change from the mutable to the immutable, that in the end, we will be as Christ, made solid instead of shadows. Insofar as in the presence of God, beyond Death’s reach, we will no longer suffer time, we should sing our Amen as well: there comes a time when faith becomes sight, when desire becomes knowledge, even if our sight will only increase across eternity.[1]
But I want to signal a caution here: to desire this stability in the moral life within time is to desire a moral life out of sync with the kind of creatures we are. We are those who drink from flowing rivers, trusting that there will be more water coming. We are those who are led, who walk forward through valleys, those who eat grass which grows back, who rest because we grow tired. To be the LORD’s creatures is to live in a way which knows that the river will always be filled with water, though not the same stream, that the grass will grow back though the seasons and textures differ, and our appetites and sensibilities for fresh grass will change.
The obvious face of this temptation, this mutability, is that of the idol, the god with iron arms, projecting strength and a thousand year reign. The idol promises freedom from death, from time itself, by offering a life beyond the frailties of time and corruption. This is the face of the idol we know well, for it is the face of empires and tyrants, of algorithms and utopias. But, like Death’s many minions, the idol has another face as well: the call of endless advocacy which invites us to take up the mantle of the idol.
This face of the idol invites us to know not just the strength of the LORD, but what that strength is for. The LORD gives strength to labor when we are weary, but this strength is not that we might fit seamlessly into a world which knows nothing of limits to our work, our freedom, or our lives. The strength of the LORD is to be able to lay our work down, at least for our own sake. The strength of the LORD is that we might enter into rest, that we might work alongside others and not overrun the weak or the tired in our own zeal to answer the calls of the world. The strength of the LORD is that we might remember that our lives are not meant to be immolated to utopian dreams, but that we might share the excess of our provision with those around us: our strength is shared strength, given from the LORD to us, and through us to others, an endless mediation of the LORD’s gifts to others, circulated like the streams and proliferating like the rhizomes of the meadow.
The Kingdom is always coming, and it is this reason that Death appears here as shadows, instead of full dark: the light of the world, the Shepherd-LORD is the one who is among us, troubling the darkness which surrounds us, illuminating the stream that flows through the valley, inflected as it is by the shadows which are now a part of what our nourishment entails. There is no banishing the dark, for though the dark will not overcome the light, it will overtake all of the sheep. And so, when Death comes at last, it comes not in the darkness, but in shadows, as the light leaves its mark forever in the world, with the sheep building cathedrals to leave behind which will refract its heat.
Becoming Death’s Friend
The last enemy is Death, but enemies are to be loved. In the presence of the Shepherd-LORD, the light in Death’s valley who makes its darkness into shadows, and so, Death too becomes a pedagogue of our finitude. Our bodies slowly fail us, our strength slowly leaves us, and we follow the LORD more slowly, less cognizant of what our hands are doing, of where our minds are. Death steals our youth, but it does not steal the LORD’s presence, for it is the LORD whose light makes possible something like a shadow. And so, in the end, Death itself is compelled to be our friend, the occasion for the redemption of our bodies.
In this, Death remains an unruly friend, wounding the sheep to our sides. The sheep follow as nothing less than a flock, bound together even when one of them goes missing, and it belongs to the flock, even as we learn our finitude and our limits, to remember that Death remains an enemy which we love, though it slay us. The sheep remain wary of this unruly friend, tending to the wounds among our flock, prioritizing the grass for the weak.
Through Death, we enter into the death and resurrection of Jesus, learning the way of the crucified, sharing the sufferings of the LORD as we share the sufferings of the world. The light of the world has not been overcome by the darkness, and in the resurrection, the darkness prove to be only shadows. Our moral lives are lived in this shadow, made alive in their rebellions of prayer and action as we embrace this valley, and see the shadows as the harbingers not of midnight, but of full day.
[1] We are, after all, creatures, even in eternity. Gregory of Nyssa describes our journey into eternity as one which will continue to grow, as appropriate to those who, even in God’s presence, remain creatures.
Loved this!
Profoundly beautiful.