Shepherd My Thoughts

Have you ever tried to sit still for five minutes and think of nothing? If you've followed the advice in my e-mails, you have. But if not, go ahead. Set a timer.

What you will discover, likely within the first ten seconds, is that your mind is not a quiet meadow but a crowded marketplace.

A grocery list elbows past a worry about your health. An old resentment resurfaces uninvited. You remember an email you forgot to send. You wonder if you left the stove on.

You judge yourself for being distracted, and then you judge yourself for judging yourself.

The interior life is loud. And most of us have simply grown accustomed to the noise.

I live near train tracks and, honestly, after living here for more than a decade I don't even notice the sound of trains anymore. When a guest comes, they pick up on it right away. "How can you live with that racket all the time?" Well, I just don't hear it anymore. I'm sure the sound is there, the noise hits my ear drums, but I've learned to tune it out.

That's how we are with many of our thoughts. They come. They go. We barely notice them anymore.

But God hears them. Every one of them.

Shepherd my thoughts, O Lord, in the mountain of my heart where you dwell.

These are words from a song that, currently, is a part of my morning "prayer list." It's based on Psalm 23 on John 10, by Br. Isaiah: you can listen to it here>>

There is something profoundly countercultural about this petition.

We are used to asking the Lord to bless our actions, to guide our decisions, to protect our loved ones. But to ask him to shepherd our thoughts—the wandering, unruly, often unwelcome flock of ideas that graze in the pastures of our minds—is to invite him into a place we rarely admit visitors.

It is to acknowledge that the Christian life does not begin at the level of what we do, but at the level of what we think.

 

The Battlefield of the Mind

Long before a sin is committed by the hand, it is entertained by the mind. Long before a virtue is practiced in the body, it is cultivated in the imagination.

The desert fathers understood this with a clarity that our modern age, so obsessed with behavior and outcomes, has largely forgotten. They spoke of the logismoi—the intruding thoughts—that pester the soul in prayer.

Evagrius Ponticus taught that the spiritual battle is fought first and foremost against these thoughts. Not against thoughts as such, for God gave us minds to think, but against the pattern of thoughts that would carry us away from him like sheep wandering from the shepherd.

Saint Paul understood this too. He wrote to the Corinthians of a warfare that is not fleshly but spiritual, in which we "take every thought captive to obey Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5). The Greek verb here is aichmalōtizontes, a striking military image meaning to lead away as a prisoner of war. Paul is saying that our thoughts must be marched, in chains if necessary, before the tribunal of Christ. This is not a suggestion. It is a strategy for spiritual survival.

And to the Romans he wrote: "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect" (Romans 12:2).

Notice the sequence. Transformation precedes discernment. And transformation happens at the level of the nous—the mind, the deep faculty of perception.

We cannot know God’s will while our thoughts run wild. The shepherding of the mind is not preparation for the spiritual life; it is the spiritual life.

 

The Mountain of the Heart

There is something worth pausing over in the image from Br. Isaiah’s song: “the mountain of my heart where you dwell.”

Why a mountain? Why not a valley, a garden, or a temple?

Scripture includes many scenes on mountains. Every time, these scenes are consequential and transformative.

Moses meets God on Sinai. Elijah hears the still small voice on Horeb. Jesus is transfigured on Tabor. The Sermon on the Mount begins with Christ ascending a hillside. Even the crucifixion happens on Mt. Calvary.

Mountains, in the biblical imagination, are the meeting places of heaven and earth, the thin places where the eternal touches the temporal. To speak of the heart as a mountain is to say that within each of us there is a summit where God has made his dwelling, a peak above the noise of the plains where communion with him is possible.

But here is the problem.

If God dwells at the summit, most of our thoughts are scattered on the lower slopes. They graze on anxieties, they wander through resentments, they chew the cud of yesterday’s grievances and tomorrow’s fears.

The shepherd’s work is to gather them upward, to lead them to the high pastures where the air is thin and the presence of God is thick.

Saint Teresa of Avila, in her Interior Castle, described the soul as a great crystal dwelling with many rooms, and she lamented how often we live in the outermost chambers, never venturing into the interior where the King awaits. Our thoughts, she observed, are like little lizards and reptiles that scurry through the outer rooms.

She was not being uncharitable to lizards. Thankfully, no lizards have subscribed to these e-mails, so I don't have to worry too much about causing offense. Teresa was, using the analogy of creatures who operate on pure instinct, with a reptilian mind, without self-reflection, self-awareness, or discernment, being honest about how disordered our minds become when they are not gathered by grace.

 

The Shepherd Who Knows His Sheep

Consider Psalm 23, the psalm on which Br. Isaiah’s song is built. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul" (Psalm 23:1-3).

Notice what the shepherd does. He makes the sheep lie down.

There is a gentle compulsion in the verb. Sheep, left to themselves, will not lie down easily. They are anxious animals, always alert to predators, always shifting and startling. A shepherd who can make his sheep lie down is a shepherd whose presence has established such peace that the flock trusts him enough to be still.

Our thoughts are much the same. They will not settle on their own.

They startle at every noise, they wander after every green shoot of distraction. But when the Shepherd is present, when we know him and he knows us, there comes a stillness that is not the absence of activity but the presence of trust.

Jesus said, "I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me" (John 10:14). The Greek verb ginōskō—to know—is not merely intellectual acquaintance. It is intimate, experiential knowledge. The Good Shepherd does not merely know about our thoughts; he knows them, in the way a mother knows the meaning of her infant’s every peculiar cry. Every little "hitch" in the sob becomes a language that she, alone, can read.

God is not scandalized by the marketplace of our minds. He has walked those streets before us.

 

Why Thoughts, and Not Just Actions?

One might reasonably ask: does it really matter what I think, as long as I do the right thing? Is God not more concerned with obedience than with the private cinema of my imagination?

Jesus answered this question in the Sermon on the Mount. "You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:27-28). And again, "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’... But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment" (Matthew 5:21-22).

This is not moral perfectionism. This is realism.

Jesus is telling us that the seed of every action is planted in the soil of thought. To leave the mind untended is to leave the ground of one’s life to whatever weeds the wind might sow.

The person who thinks kindly, over time, becomes kind. The person who nurses grievances, over time, becomes bitter. The person who fills the mind with the beauty of God, over time, begins to reflect that beauty.

This is why the psalmist prays, "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer" (Psalm 19:14).

The meditation of the heart. The undercurrent of the mind. The words no one else hears. These, too, must be offered.

 

How Music Carries our Prayers

There is a reason the Psalms were sung, and a reason songs like Br. Isaiah’s often take the form of prayers.

Music has a way of doing what words alone cannot. It engages the body, it stirs the affections, it slips past the guards of the rational mind and lodges itself in the deeper chambers of memory.

Saint Augustine is supposed to have said that the one who sings prays twice. In his Confessions, he wrote of being moved to tears by the singing of the Church at Milan, and he understood that melody could carry truth into the heart along pathways that argument could not travel.

When we sing a phrase like “Shepherd my thoughts,” we are not merely reciting a request. We are training the soul. We are inscribing on the tablets of memory a petition that will rise unbidden in the middle of the anxious afternoon, in the sleepless hour before dawn, in the tense moment before a difficult conversation.

Consider this. When you speak a prayer in the morning, do those words stay with you? When you pray in song, though, the words might echo in your mind for hours, perhaps the entire day. There's a reason why songs get "stuck in our minds," when spoken words do not.

When we pray with a song, the song becomes a kind of interior liturgy, a rhythm that shepherds the mind even when we are not consciously praying.

 

Practical Shepherding

How, then, do we cooperate with the Shepherd’s work in the pasture of our thoughts?

First, begin the day by giving him the flock of your mind. Before the phone is checked, before the news is consumed, before the mind is handed over to a thousand competing voices, offer the day’s thoughts to the Lord. A simple phrase will do: Shepherd my thoughts today. This is not magic; it is intention. And intention shapes attention.

Second, learn to notice the wandering sheep. Throughout the day, pause and ask: Where has my mind been? Not with self-condemnation, but with honesty. If you find that you have been rehearsing an old wound, gently lead that thought back to the Shepherd. If you find you have been feeding on anxiety, offer it to him. The desert fathers counseled a practice called nepsis, or watchfulness. It is simply the habit of noticing what one is thinking, and choosing where the mind will rest.

Third, feed the mind on what is good. Saint Paul offers what may be the most practical counsel in all of Scripture: "Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things" (Philippians 4:8). The mind, like a sheep, will graze on whatever pasture it is led to. Choose the pasture. Music can be a powerful way of doing that. Pay attention to the kind of music you listen to—it will "shepherd" your thoughts one way or another, so make sure it's the Good Shepherd whose words are reaching you in song.

Fourth, when the thoughts grow wild, return to a short prayer. The Jesus Prayer—Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner—has been a shepherd’s staff to countless souls. So has the simple phrase like the one from Br. Isaiah’s song. A short prayer, repeated with love, gathers the scattered flock as surely as a shepherd’s whistle.

Finally, trust the Shepherd. He is not standing at the edge of the pasture with a scowl, tapping his foot at your distraction. He is walking among the sheep, knowing each one by name, patient with the ones who wander farthest, laying down his life for the flock.

Shepherd my thoughts, O Lord, in the mountain of my heart where you dwell.

It is a small prayer. But small prayers, offered often, become the very geography of a transformed life. And a mind gathered by the Good Shepherd is a mind that begins, slowly and surely, to think the thoughts of God.

 

God Bless,

Judah

 

P.S. Feel free to look up Br. Isaiah on Spotify or whatever music platform you listen to. His catalogue is full of such prayerful songs. When one strikes you as particular relevant to what's going on in your life, consider turning it into a prayer to begin each day.