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Sunday
As two of today’s lectionary readings employ the shepherd metaphor, as does the psalm, I share two poems about shepherds. To set them up, here’s Jeremiah decrying Israel’s bad leaders:
Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.
And now Jesus:
As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.
We’ll also be reading the 23rd psalm, which you all know and which is one of the Bible’s great poems. I always prefer the gorgeous King James version, in part because my sophomore English teacher had us memorize it in the Episcopalian prep school that I attended:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
The sense of peace in the face of adversity is one of the striking aspects of the psalm. William Blake taps into this same well of comfort in “The Shepherd,” which appears in Songs of Innocence:
How sweet is the shepherd’s sweet lot!
From the morn to the evening he strays;
He shall follow his sheep all the day,
And his tongue shall be filled with praise.For he hears the lambs’ innocent call,
And he hears the ewes’ tender reply;
He is watchful while they are in peace,
For they know when their shepherd is nigh.
Note the shift in focus from the shepherd who worships to the sheep who know “when their shepherd is nigh.” As the psalmist puts it, “Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
Poet Malcolm Guite alerted me to the second poem, which is by Richard Bauckman. In “The Song of the Shepherds,” the shepherds recall the light they witnessed when Jesus was born, describing it as
a song of solar glory,
unutterable, unearthly,
eclipsed the luminaries of the night,
as though the world were exorcised of dark
and, coming to itself, began again.
Since then, however, they have seen only darkness:
Later we returned to the flock.
The night was ominously black.
The stars were silent as the sheep.
Nights pass, year on year.
We clutch our meagre cloaks against the cold.
The use of the word “clutch” signals that the poet is referencing T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” where the wisemen feel similarly bereft in the years since they witnessed the miraculous birth:
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
Here’s Bauckman’s poem
The Song of the Shepherds
By Richard BauckmanWe were familiar with the night.
We knew its favorite colors,
its sullen silence
and its small, disturbing sounds,
its unprovoked rages,
its savage dreams.
We slept by turns,
attentive to the flock.
We said little.
Night after night, there was little to say.
But sometimes one of us,
skilled in that way,
would pipe a tune of how things were for us.
They say that once, almost before time,
the stars with shining voices
serenaded
the new born world.
The night could not contain their boundless praise.
We thought that just a poem —
until the night
a song of solar glory,
unutterable, unearthly,
eclipsed the luminaries of the night,
as though the world were exorcised of dark
and, coming to itself, began again.
Later we returned to the flock.
The night was ominously black.
The stars were silent as the sheep.
Nights pass, year on year.
We clutch our meager cloaks against the cold.
Our aging piper’s fumbling fingers play,
night after night,
an earthly echo of the song that banished dark.
It has stayed with us.
Although they are clutching their meager cloaks against the dark cold, the shepherds can still hear the celestial music, even if only faintly, and they attempt to echo it with fumbling fingers. The idea that one can catch only a glimpse of revelation is also an Eliot theme, such as is to be found in “The Hollow Men.” Seeking for the souls in Dante’s Paradiso, the hollow speaker hears only voices
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
A more positive way to think of this revelation, however—one that points a way forward toward hope—can be found in Lucille Clifton’s poem “the man who killed the bear.” Remembering, at news of her father’s death, how he sexually abused her when a child, Clifton reveals her way of dealing with the darkness. Speaking to the moon, which witnessed the crime but did nothing, she notes that she is not entirely without aid. When she recalls that the moon “catches the sun and keeps most of him/ for the evening that surely will come/ and it comes,” she writes,
only then did i know that to live
in the world all that i needed was
some small light and know that indeed
i would rise again and rise again to dance.
Distant recollection of the song of solar glory, in other words, does not merely stay with her, as it does with Bauckman’s shepherds. It leads to joyful celebration.
