The Presence at the Center

When we went to church last Sunday I thought I was going to be utterly bored... but at least I didn't have to "dress up": I thought shorts and a short sleeve shirt was a perfectly ok outfit for my appointment with God. My mother in law's husband was going to read Psalm 23 in English and another member of the congregation in Spanish. They really wanted us to go and be with them there. I was ready to snooze for an hour blanketed by Christian imagery and lulled by a zealous and predictable sermon. Instead I heard about the presence at the center.

After the psalm was read in English and Spanish, the pastor started reading the poem, line by line, paying special attention to what he saw as the center of the poem:
Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, [a]
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
Here the pastor pointed out the shift in grammatical person. At the beginning of the poem god is "He", in the stanza quoted above god is "You". What the pastor was trying to tell his congregation is that this grammatical shift pointed towards a more assertive presence, the presence of god. Topographically, this stanza describes a center as well: the "valley of the shadow of death". The valley that is in between the grassy sunny plains and the mountains.

As I listened, a number of questions came to my mind: what does the fixation for finding a center tell us about a society (or a particular segment of society)? What is so comforting about looking and creating a center? Is it the hope of the revelation of a presence in that center?

The pastor talked about how most people who stand in the "valley" feel sometimes that god has abandoned them: the suspicion of an absence. A strange paradoxical duality seems to lie at the heart (a metaphor revealing our center oriented language) of the concept of center: abscence and presence. It was funny to hear echoes of Derrida in a Sunday morning sermon, a great appetizer right before we left church to have Mexican lunch.