Monday, July 12, 2021

Repeat After Me: "The Lord Is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want"

Me, at Green Lake Conference Center, Wisconsin

When I teach people to pray, and in my spiritual formation classes, I use Psalm 23 as the meditative focus (for the past 30+ years!). So I was pleased to read this from Henri Nouwen's A Spirituality of Living. He writes:

"Oh, if we could sit for just one half hour a day doing nothing except taking a simple word or phrase from the Bible and holding it in our heart and mind. “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Ps. 23:1, NRSV). Say it three times. We know it’s not true, because we want many things. That is exactly why we’re so nervous. But if we keep saying the truth, the real truth—“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want”—and let that truth descend from our minds into our hearts, gradually those words will be written on the walls of our inner holy place. That becomes the space in which we can receive our colleagues and our work, our family and our friends, and the people we will meet during the day." (Pp. 16-17)