God is my shepherd,
so nothing shall I want,
I rest in the meadows
of faithfulness and love,
I walk by the quiet waters of peace.
And, in the next verse:
Gently you raise me
and heal my weary soul,
you lead me by pathways
of righteousness and truth,
my spirit shall sing
the music of your name.
After being subjected to the hymn of explication and allegorizing, sung with the musical notes of loyalty and gentleness, accompanied by the piano of fidelity and hope, I always wish neckties were a handier way to strangle oneself than they actually are. At least it's not technically wrong about anything; this is indeed one way you could read Psalm 23. One way you could read it without being forced to sing it heavy-handedly as if it were the only thing to be had from it. You could substitute all of the abstract nouns, Mad Lib style, without seriously changing the song, so it's even worse than just an over-allegorizing hymn: it's an over-allegorizing hymn that makes the allegory empty and meaningless. You could just as easily sing:
I rest in the meadows
of honesty and truth,
I walk by the quiet waters of hope.
you lead me by pathways
of gentleness and faith...
Or anything else at all. It reminds me of the (much prettier) Bette Midler song (actually Nanci Griffith, but Bette Midler made it very famous), "From a Distance", which would not fundamentally change if you substituted "on the TV" for every instance of "from a distance":
On the TV the world looks blue and green,
and the snow-capped mountains white.
On the TV the ocean meets the stream,
and the eagle takes to flight.
I'm pretty sure I've seen that program. And I'm very sure that, somewhere out there, someone's life just suddenly makes so much more sense at the words, "God is watching us...on the TV."
The pinnacle of poetry is that every word counts, so it's not surprising that a sign of weak lyrics is that the words don't matter. This isn't a problem if you're singing "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"; it's a little more problematic when you're singing a hymn.
