Items of Interest April 25, 2011 Issue

In the palm of his hand

Sam Wells

Head out on a tour of the castles of medieval Europe and you’ll quickly catch on to a castle’s three key features. What you see first is the bailey—a large area surrounded by a substantial wall where most of the population lived and most of the life of the community was conducted. Then, in one section of the expansive enclosure, like an egg yolk sunny-side up in the “white” of the bailey, lies the motte, a mound of earth raised significantly higher than the rest of the castle. On top of the mound lies the keep, a large vertical structure, sometimes cylindrical, sometimes square.

Dictionary.com offers no fewer than 39 meanings of the word keep, from “tend” to “hold” to “maintain.” None are dramatic or glamorous; all are prosaic and unpretentious, but also sturdy, reliable, trustworthy, and durable. Keep means permanence. Keep means unswerving loyalty. Keep means provision and care and protection.

We all know the psalm that says, “The Lord is my shepherd.” We’ve all entered the imaginative world of a sheep on the Judean hillside— . . . . But Psalm 121 has a different picture. In eight verses it repeats the same message over and over again. “He who keeps you . . . The Lord will keep you. . . .The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in.” Six times in eight verses. Maybe the psalm is trying to tell us something. . . . 

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