The Other Shepherds
Learning to hear Psalm 23 again in a world full of voices
The phone is the first voice of the morning. Before the light, before the coffee, before anything else, a small rectangle of glass tells us what to be worried about today. It knows our name. It has been thinking about us while we slept. When we pick it up, it is already mid-sentence.
The phone is not the point. It is only the easiest place to notice what is usually harder to see.
There are other voices. Most of them are quieter. Some of them sound like our own thoughts. Together, they do something simple and consequential. They tell us what to want, what to fear, where to go, when to rest. They set the terms of the day before we have fully entered it.
Psalm 23 is one of the most familiar passages in the English language. “The Lord is my shepherd.” We know it from funerals, from needlepoints, from music. Most of us could say the first lines from memory. Its familiarity may be the reason we have stopped hearing it. Because underneath the comfort it offers, the Psalm is asking a question that is sharper than we usually let it be.
Not: is the Lord my shepherd? The Psalm takes that as given.
The question is: what else has been?
The Voices We Follow
A shepherd is a voice you follow, and more than that, a presence that directs, provides, and keeps you. By that definition, we have many.
The algorithm is one. It is designed to hold our attention. It decides what reaches us and what does not, whose voice we hear and whose we never encounter. It learns what keeps us looking and gives us more of it. Much more. Over time, it shapes what we notice, then what we think is important, then what we believe the world is like. Most of us did not so much agree to this as drift into it.
Outrage is another. There is always something to be angry about, sometimes for good reason. But the cycle trains a particular reflex. It offers the feeling of clarity without requiring sustained attention or responsibility. It can keep us engaged for hours while leaving very little behind.
Productivity is a quieter one. It often begins as a virtue. Work matters. Effort matters. But the voice can shift. It starts to say that our worth is measured only in what we produce, and that rest must be earned. Follow it long enough and it will lead toward total exhaustion and call that exhaustion achievement.
There are others. The doom scroll of comparison. The constant suggestion that we are one purchase away from being complete. The pull of a tribe that offers belonging at the cost of discernment. They rarely present themselves as shepherds. They present themselves as information, connection, self-improvement. But they lead. And we follow.
This is not a rejection of modern life. These voices give real things. Connection, stimulation, a sense of being in the world. That is why they are persuasive. The question is not whether they are entirely good or bad. The question is whether they are telling the truth about who we are and where they lead.
Psalm 23 answers that question by naming a different shepherd, and by inviting you to listen again. Not an abstraction, but a voice that, in this Sunday’s Gospel reading, takes on a name: Jesus Christ, who says, “I am the good shepherd.”
Reading the Psalm Out Loud
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
The ancient sense of want here is lack. Not the absence of all desire, but the refusal of a life organized around it. Say that sentence slowly in a culture that depends on the continual production of new wants. The Psalm begins by denying that premise. It describes a form of life in which what is most necessary is not missing.
“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.”
This line lands differently in a life that has forgotten how to lie down. We replace rest with distraction, stillness with stimulation. The Psalm does not suggest rest. It says the shepherd makes it happen. The voice is not loud, but it is steady, and it does not negotiate endlessly with your habits.
“He restoreth my soul.”
Not improves. Not optimizes. Restores. Returns what has been worn down. The dominant voices offer upgrade and reinvention. The Psalm assumes something more basic. You already have a soul. It is tired. It needs to be given back to itself.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”
Fear is one of the most reliable ways to hold attention. Much of what we consume is designed, directly or indirectly, to keep us alert and unsettled. The Psalm does not deny the valley. It names it plainly. What it denies is that fear is the final authority within it.
“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”
The image is not subtle. It is about provision and steadiness in the face of what opposes you. The enemies are real. They do not disappear. But they no longer determine the terms of the meal. The table is set by someone else.
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”
The word translated follow carries the sense of pursuit. Not trailing behind, but coming after with intent. Goodness and mercy are not distant qualities. They are active. They move toward you. They have been doing so longer than the other voices have been speaking.
The question is whether you recognize them.
Turning Back
How does that recognition begin. Not by rejecting the world you are in. Not by trying to overpower the other voices through effort alone. It begins with attention, practiced in small ways.
The Daily Office is one. If the first voice of the morning is a psalm instead of a feed, it begins to change what you expect the day to sound like. If the last voice of the night is Compline, sleep settles differently.
The Eucharist is another. A table is set. Bread is broken. The shepherd does not only speak. He gives Himself. What presses in from outside does not disappear. But for that hour, it does not determine what is true.
Silence is another. Even a few minutes begins to clear space. At first, what you hear is mostly your own fatigue. Stay there, and something steadier begins to come into range.
These are not techniques so much as interruptions. Ways of stepping out of the stream long enough to notice that there has been another voice present the entire time.
The Gospel reading for this Sunday, John 10, says that the shepherd calls His own sheep by name, and that they know His voice. Not a general voice, but a particular one. The same passage says that they do not follow a stranger. That kind of knowing is not automatic. It is learned. It takes time to distinguish one voice from another.
The Pursuit
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”
Read that line again without the familiarity.
Something is following you. Not the loudest voice. Not the most immediate one. Something else. It has been present through every crowded morning and every distracted meal, through every hour shaped by other demands.
The voices that shepherd us will continue to speak. The work is not to eliminate them. The work is to remember that they are not the only ones, and not the truest ones.
“And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
The Psalm ends with arrival. Not an escape from the world, but a settling within it. You stop moving from voice to voice, and find that you are already being held.
The house is quieter than you expected.
That is how you know which voice is His.