Meditation on Psalm 23: Want
Reading 7: Psalm 22-23
Psalm 23 focal phrase: “I shall not want.” focal word: want The first verse of the most familiar psalm is routinely mis-heard. “I shall not want,” we read, and we think of managing our wants, our desires. The quirk here is the change in meaning over the past few centuries of the English word “want.” It started out as a word for “lack.” Back in the 1400s, Sir Richard Ros wrote, “To give the good where it wanteth, trewly, That were resoun and a curteys maner” (“To give the good where it wanteth [is missing], truly that is reasonable and a curteous manner”) (quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary). In 1577, W.H. Turner wrote, “Everye one that shall wante his gowne shall lose his place.” “Want” could also mean “to come up short,” as when Henry Fielding wrote in his 1749 novel, “The History of Tom Jones,” “Of my fortune not one farthing could be touched till I was of age, of which I wanted now more than two years.” Of course, these associations with lacking and falling short led the word “want” to take on a new meaning in English. In Shakespeare’s King Richard II, Northumberland says to Boling that his trip will be “wearie” because he will be “wanting your companie.” He means “lacking your company,” but you can hear how natural it is for “want” to come to mean to wish or desire what is lacking. When you lack company, you start to want company. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of this new “desire” meaning of the word “want” is from 1706, in a text that reads, “All such as want to ride in Post-haste from one World to the other.” This “desire” meaning emerges nearly 500 years after the word “want” first appeared in print, in the early 1200s. Today, the “desire” meaning of the word “want” is primary—not only in the dictionary, but in North American culture, a culture drowning in the greed of its wants. The old sense of “want” clings to life in two phrases you’ll still occasionally hear in modern English. One is to be “found wanting,” as in G.K. Chesterton’s quote: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” The other is “for want of ...”—as in the phrase “for want of prosecution” (a legal phrase for when a plaintiff fails to show up in court). A search for the phrase “found wanting” gets about three times as many hits on Google as the phrase “found lacking”. A search for “for want of - “ gets over one million hits—but “for lack of - “ nets nearly 7 million. There’s a downside and an upside, I think, to hearing the newer sense of the word “want,” rather than the older one, when we read Psalm 23. The downside is that in reading “I shall not want,” we might equate faithful living simply with the successful moderation of desires, like the Stoics. To quote C.S. Lewis: “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. ... We are far too easily pleased.” But the upside is that “want” is indeed tied to “need.” Wants stem from needs, or at least from perceived needs. You could define a “want” as a delusional need: “I just gotta have it!” The gift of our shepherd is, in part, the correct perception of our needs. Another word for this gift of peace and surrender is “contentment.” “If we have food and clothing,” Paul writes to Timothy in 1 Timothy 6, “we will be content with that.” Because the Lord is our shepherd, we are free from our wants and unburdened of our needs. We can sing, in the words of Marty Haugen’s song:
Shepherd me, O God, beyond my wants, beyond my fears, from death into life
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