A Meditation on Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures.
In a thicket of trees between two vast farm fields, a plywood trapdoor built into the forest floor opened to reveal stairs leading underground. Inside was a subterranean bunker, cut into the black earth, where Ukrainian troops from a mortar unit awaited coordinates for their next target.
The Lord is my shepherd. He leads be besides still waters.
The men squeezed past one another down a shoulder-width dirt corridor lit with LED strips, staring at tablet computers showing a live drone feed of the terrain outside. Blast waves from artillery shells and rockets shook the bunker, and a radio crackled with a warning of incoming Russian helicopters.
The Lord is my shepherd. He restores my soul.
But the soldiers were focused on their screens, specifically on a line of Russian troops and heavy equipment dug in a short distance away and marked with red plus signs. That would be their target. “The guys dug all this by hand, and they want to fight, they want to shoot,” said the unit commander, a 32-year-old with a braided ponytail who uses the call sign Shuler. “We just want to kick them off our land, that’s it.”
(This account of the war in Ukraine comes from a reporter and a photographer who imbedded themselves with Ukrainian troops in the southeastern part of Ukraine in preparation for a spring counteroffensive.)
The Lord is my shepherd. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.
After 14 months of nonstop fighting, Ukrainian soldiers are exhausted. Shuler’s hands now shake uncontrollably, the result of a concussion suffered when a tank round exploded near him at the beginning of the war. A history teacher before the invasion, Shuler views the looming fight within a broader context. He wears a patch with a Star of David on his arm, a reminder of his great-grandparents who died in the Holocaust. His Jewish grandfather had to change his name to sound more Russian when the Soviets took control of his native western Ukraine at the end of World War II. Now, Shuler must hide his face, refusing to be photographed for fear that his parents who are now trapped in their own home town by Russian occupiers, could suffer reprisals from the occupiers. “Imagine the situation, you’re alive, but your life has been taken away,” he said. “We’ll have nowhere to return to if we don’t stop this, if we don’t end it, if we don’t win.”
The Lord is my shepherd. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil…
The intensity of that early fighting is evident in a swath of annihilated villages that stretches along the front. Mangled armored vehicles sit parked between burned-out houses. Soldiers said they had tried to collect most of the bodies of those killed in the fighting, but on a recent day, the skeletonized remains of a Russian soldier, still dressed in a green camouflage uniform with a hammer and sickle belt buckle, lay in the yard of an abandoned home, red tulips and yellow daffodils blooming nearby.
The Lord is my shepherd…for you are with me; your rod and your staff – they comfort me.
At the far end of the bunker, closest to the Russian lines, soldiers rolled open another trapdoor — this one made of metal and plastic sheeting, and built on a track — exposing the muzzle of an Iranian-made HM16 mortar to a blue sky. It was a demonstration of the ingenuity that has kept the smaller, weaker Ukrainian armed forces in the fight. Though practically under the Russians’ noses, the mortar team is largely invisible in the underground shelter, even to the Russian drones that are constantly buzzing overhead. “Postril!” a soldier yelled. Fire! A fat mortar round shot in the direction of a group of about 10 Russian soldiers that a reconnaissance team had identified in a nearby tree line. The shock wave from the mortar’s report reverberated down the length of the bunker, compressing lungs and rattling teeth.
The Lord is my shepherd…You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies…
The incoming shells howled overhead, their explosions getting closer and closer as Russian troops stationed about a mile away adjusted their cannon’s trajectory. But the Ukrainian artillery team positioned to return fire was unfazed. The men joked as they loaded shells into their Australian-made howitzer in the shade of a cherry tree, swatting away bees that hummed around its white spring blooms. They fired. And fired again. After the fifth round, the Russian side fell silent.
The Lord is my shepherd…you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
In Bakhmut, there was never even time to sleep, (a soldier named) Stayer said. The muck and fatigue of battle had so changed his appearance that his iPhone’s face recognition system ceased to work for a bit, he said. Inside his phone was a horror show: drone photographs of fields littered with Russian bodies blown apart by the mortars his team had fired at them.
The Lord is my shepherd…Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…
A pensioner who longs to return home to his ailing sister. An exiled small-town mayor who is already drawing up plans to rebuild once the Russians are gone. Since the beginning of the war, the city of Zaporizhzhia, the regional capital, has been a refuge for thousands who have fled the Russian takeover of towns and villages farther south. But for many, it has never become a home. Now like never before, talk of a counteroffensive has begun to buoy hopes that they will someday go back. “I think our guys will get going soon and give it to them right in the …” Volodymyr Mateiko, a retired truck driver, said, finishing the sentence with a vulgarity.
The Lord is my shepherd…and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
So there you have it. A meditation today based upon the interaction between the 23rd Psalm and a reporter’s account of what it’s like in the trenches of the Ukrainian/Russian war. The soothing, 23rd psalm sprinkled atop the horrors of war. The comforting 23rd psalm interwoven among the evil wrought by human hands. The balming 23rd psalm to heal the sin-sick soul of domination.
There’s a very good reason why the 23rd Psalm is the most-used, most referenced passage of scripture at funerals. When mother, father, husband, wife, brother, sister, child friend dies, grief cuts through your very soul, and the 23rd psalm touches your soul with a nudge of comfort. The 23rd psalm is God’s embrace of you in your moment of pain.
May today’s meditation on Psalm 23 be God’s embrace of every soldier and everyone we’ve heard about today in the thick of the war. May today’s meditation on Psalm 23 be our gift, our actual embrace of every soldier, everyone heard about today. May we so believe in the benevolent and abundant love of the Good Shepherd, that our prayer today is felt by each and every soldier, every victim heard about today. May this be our prayer. May this be their hope. May this be our faith in action. May our meditation of those in pain a half-world away be for them God as Good Shepherd
…and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Amen.
Source: The New York Times, Saturday, April 29, 2023
By Michael Schwirtz Photographs by David Guttenfelder