The notebook · August 31, 2026

The rampart I prefer

There is a verse in Psalm 91 I have known for years, and this week I realised I had only kept half of it.

He will cover you with his feathers. Under his wings you will take refuge. His faithfulness is your shield and rampart.

Psalm 91:4 (World English Bible)

When the verse comes back to me, it is always the last three words. The shield, the rampart. Stone and metal, a distance, something standing between the blow and me. I can say that part of the line on a crowded train without losing any of my composure.

The feathers, no. The feathers I step over. I had not even forgotten them. I had filed them away with the pretty images, the kind that go on greeting cards.

And yet it is one promise, in one line, and the order is not the one I would have chosen. Feathers first. The rampart is added afterwards, as though it were the military translation of a gesture with nothing military about it.

What I see, when I stay with it, is that the two protections do not ask the same thing of me. Behind a rampart I stay upright, full height, and I can go on not knowing who built it. Under a wing you have to be smaller than the one covering you, and you have to be touched. Nobody takes shelter under a wing at a respectful distance.

So I wanted to settle it comfortably: say the two images are equal, that each of us takes the one that speaks to us, that I am simply more of a rampart person. That would hold, except that the feathers are not a poet’s ornament. Jesus takes the image up himself, and not in a gentle place.

[…] how often I would have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not.

Matthew 23:37 (World English Bible)

It is the end of the sentence that holds me. The refusal is expected. It is not presented as a wickedness, more as something that happens, and that happens to people who pray a great deal.

I am not going to conclude that I will now switch halves of the verse. I tried this evening, once, saying the first part and stopping before the second, and I heard myself speed up over the feathers exactly the way one walks past an open door without looking in.

I note only this, which is enough for today: I often ask to be protected, and I have never once asked to be covered.

In Manna, tomorrow, a verse I will not have chosen.