The Shepherd, June 2004
BLESSED IS THE MAN, 2
David acquired innumerable riches, which he gathered with his own sword. Gold was laid up in his storehouses as if it were mere copper, and silver was stowed away therein as if it were mere iron. But David did not say that it was in riches that the blessedness of man consists.
David enjoyed all the worldly comforts; but in not one of them does he recognise the blessedness of man.
When David was a child, when his occupation was pasturing the sheep of his father Jesse, unexpectedly, at the command of God, the Prophet Samuel came that he might anoint with holy oil the poor shepherd-boy to be king over the people of Israel. Yet David does not mark the hour of his anointing as king as a time of blessedness.
The days of his childhood David spent in a wild wilderness. There his muscles began to develop like unto the muscles of a valourous warrior; without weapons, with his bare hands alone, he fell upon a lion and a bear, he triumphed over the lion and the bear. There too his soul began to advance and to be filled with heavenly aspirations. The hands, which had subdued the lion and the bear, made the psaltery, they plucked its strings striving to bring them into accord with the action of the Spirit, that they might give forth harmonious, delightful, spiritual and rational sounds. From far, far away, across the times, across the centuries and millennia, those sounds are carried, repeated again and again by innumerable voices; the name of David is praised to the very ends of earth and in every age of Christian existence. But it was not the life of the desert, full as it is of wondrous struggles, of wondrous aspiration, that David characterises as blessedness for man.
Blessed is the man, he sings out, - who in whatever place, in whatever calling, in whatever condition or rank this man might be - that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, not sat in the seat of the pestilent (Ps. 1:1).
Blessed is the man, who keeps himself from sin, who pushes sin away from himself in whatever guise, in whatever attire, that sin might present itself to him; whether it appear as a lawless act, or whether it present itself as a thought suggesting some transgression, or as a feeling promising satisfaction, or as a sinful ecstacy.
And if a frail woman should with such manly fortitude push sin away from herself, then she too is that blessed man, whom David hymns.
Even infants and children who stand up against sin are participants in this blessedness; they are participants in the manly stature which is Christ’s. For with God there is no respect of persons.
Blessed is the man, whose will is in the law of God (see Ps. 1:2). Blessed is that heart, which has matured through the recognition of God’s will, which perceives that the Lord is good (Ps. 33:8) having attained this vision by “tasting” (Ps. 33:8) the commandments of the Lord, by wedding its will to the will of the Lord. Such a heart is “the man” (Ps. 1:1). Blessed is the heart, which is kindled by Divine zeal! Blessed is the heart, which burns with an insatiable desire for the will of God! Blessed is the heart, which suffers unbearably and yet delectably with love for God! Such a heart is the locus, the dwelling-place, the ark and throne of blessedness! 
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