Ethics Through the 23rd Psalm:"I Shall Not Want"

Desire, Hunger, and Moral Goods

The first statement that the 23rd Psalm drives into us is the largest framework of the moral life—that we live our lives on borrowed time and borrowed soil, led by the God who is bound up in time with us. This is not, I think, an affirmation that God is somehow dependent upon creation, but rather a simple affirmation that the God who calls us into communion is not somewhere else, but among us, present within the world in this form and in this shape. God is not the cosmic tyrant, but the shepherd, the Holy One in the tent in the desert, the crucified Lord lying dead.

This frame, that the LORD is the one intimate to us, both creates real hope and terror at once: the Holy Spirit is not some force to be wielded, but the LORD of creation. Alan Jacobs has described this as “the speed of God”, a phrase which is just perfect in naming what this means—that being a creature involves resisting the Promethean speed and the temptation to lift off from what it means to be a dying creature. We are creatures, but here, we must be careful in how we name this. There’s a way of talking about ourselves as creatures as “messy” or “limited” which is, I think, a way of closing ourselves off from both aspiration and pain: by lowering our sights, we don’t have to jump too high, try too much, or—most importantly—be changed by God.

To be a creature is to be a being that is in flux, not immutable, not static. We age, hunger, decay, and dream. Nearly a millenium ago, Thomas Aquinas named the difference between creation and God as the difference between essence and existence: essence just simply is, without potential and without change, where existence is always in flux. Anything in existence, because it is thrown into time and space—because it does not begin on its own resources—is dependent, caused, and needy. It is my tomato plants in need of rain, humans in need of love, stars in need of helium to burn.

And it is, from one angle, the part of being human that we’re most embarrassed by, or most confounded by: that we are never satisfied, but always desiring beings. We are not those whose desires do not change: infants desire differently and different things than adults. And it is in that hunger that the great axis of the Christian moral life appears. Desire—desire for existence and all that sustains it, both materially and immaterially—is part of the deal. There is no space in being a human moral creature that lies outside that matrix, if we are those who are characterized by existence. And yet, not all that is desired is good on the face, either in the way we desire it or in the measure.

To say that we want is the first step to being able to confess, with the Psalmist, that in the presence of the LORD, we will approach not-wanting. But denying wanting, desire itself, is no good, for that is what we are as creatures: wanting, desiring beings, unable to sustain ourselves except by that which comes from outside ourselves. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his lectures on Genesis, describes the tree at the center of the garden in this way, a sign of the thing which sustains our lives which is both among us, and yet not generated by us. We are, he says, those whose lives are meant to be eccentric, always reaching out, because that it is what our created existence is: a constant reaching out, for God, the One who has created and sustains us.

The banishing of desire, of need, from the moral life, has led in many cases to thinking in only one way, namely, command. We do what has been commanded of us, irrespective of desire, need, or want, and find our happiness not in satisfaction of desire but of having been unworthy servants. I’m reminded of an essay that Kierkegaard wrote on “The Difference Between a Genius and An Apostle”, in which he argues that it’s doing God a disservice to do what we have been asked because we find the rationale satisfactory; either we do what God requires because God is God, or we implicitly judge the calling of God to my deliberative faculties. I get his concern, that we not treat God’s calling as if they were advice columns. But he also makes too little of the way in which, with the Psalmist, need and desire, are put front and center in terms of the relation between the LORD and creation. We are created as desiring-beings, and it is no shame of ours that that is the case.

To the naming of that desire? Next week.

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Reading: Martha Nussbaum’s Cosmopolitanism was a great read. I’m inclined toward the notion that we owe things to one another irrespective of national identity already, but Nussbaum’s work helped me to think through some of the implications more carefully. Simeon Zahl’s The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience gives a lot more careful treatment to the goodness of our experiences with God than Christians tend to concede. What are we if not beings who encounter God with our affections, our emotions, our desire?

Writing And Such: I had the chance to do a webinar broadly over the topic of my most recent book, on isolation and the church. Buy the book here, and watch the webinar here. Lots of other writing in the works, but nothing out yet, or even soonish, for that matter. After publishing two books and a few other pieces this Spring, I’m in a season of lots of reading, some early writing, and tending to the millions of details of being a professor, dad, and husband.

The next two things I’m going to be writing are 1) a book I began several years ago with Baker Academic, looking at how our understanding of what church is changed profoundly during the long 20th century, and 2) a book putting Dorothy Day into conversation with modern moral theology. She’s the saint that people pat on the head and admire, but don’t regularly take seriously. This book will change that. Or not.