Celebrating 40 Years of "Shepherd Me, O God"
As we celebrate 40 years of "Shepherd Me, O God", Marty Haugen tells the story of its composition and we explore its enduring legacy.
Few songs have found the space occupied by Marty Haugen’s Shepherd Me, God. Now, forty years since its composition, it is found in countless Christian hymnals, it is a top seller among the GIA catalog, and it remains a highly sought-after choice for funeral liturgies.
In his interview with the Open Your Hymnal podcast, Marty recounted how Shepherd Me, O God was written:
…my wife and I, and our two children took a sabbatical at a retreat center in the mountains. It was a small community in the winter there were sixty people, and every night we had evening prayer. And after evening prayer there was so much snow that people would sit around and critique evening prayer, and tell you what was wrong with it. And I got a commission to set the twenty-third Psalm. And when you get the twenty-third psalm, you don’t want to try and set something that’s so embedded in people’s minds and so I struggled with it. And I struggled with it, and I struggled with it. And every night the congregation at evening prayer told me what was wrong with the setting I was doing.
And I realized, part of the thing was that I’ve never met a shepherd. My wife was the one who finally said “why don’t you make it a verb?” And then I realized, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want", and then there’s a verse about fear, and then there’s the final verse about from death into life; and so the natural sequence came out of that. But I will say there were like thirty versions that I rejected before I got to that one. You try to make it sound effortless but it was a lot of work. And if you look at the verses, and you know the twenty-third Psalm, and many of you do, I tried to stay as close as I could to the verses as possible, so that you would start to actually learn the psalm by singing.
*This is a transcript of a spoken live interview; it has been edited for clarity.
In 2015, Marty spoke to C. Michael Hawn (Director of the Sacred Music program at the Perkins School of Theology), and further reflected on his relationship to the Psalms:
“The more time I spend in prayer and reflection upon the psalms, the more I realize how they have formed the core of my sung and silent prayer. All of human life is there--thanksgiving and praise, lament and loss, anger and fear and always, hope. The psalms connect me in a profound way with individuals pray-ers and communities from every generation and culture, with Jews and Christians, saints and certainly sinners. Many times I have found the psalms to be the only prayer that I could pray in difficult and empty times.”
Additional Arrangements
G-4556 Shepherd Me, O God: Gathering Rite - arr. Marty Haugen
G-10804 Shepherd Me, O God - arr. M. Roger Holland, II
G-7255 Shepherd Me, O God - arr. for handbells by Philip L. Roberts
D-920314 Shepherd Me, O God - arr. for organ by Lothar Bandermann
Latest Release
The songs and prayers of Open Our Hearts come together to create a helpful resource for faith communities desiring to introduce contemplative worship, or a supplement for communities already praying “in the style of Taizé” or “prayer around the cross.”
Read more and preview the collection at our previous Substack article.
About Marty Haugen
Marty Haugen is a liturgical composer, workshop presenter, performing and recording artist, and author from Eagan, Minnesota. For the past 30 years, Marty has presented hundreds of workshops and concerts across North and Central America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Rim. He has over 30 recordings and more than 400 separate printed editions available through GIA Publications, Inc. and other publishers. He has a number of published mass settings for Roman Catholic communities, including Mass of Creation, and several worship settings for Lutheran congregations, including Holden Evening Prayer and Now the Feast and Celebration, as well as a communion setting for the new Evangelical Worship Book (ELW-Augsburg Fortress).
Marty has served as an editor or consultant to a number of GIA hymnals and has been a contributor to hymnals or supplements for many denominational groups including the ELCA and ELCIC (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and Canada), the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Mennonite Brethren, the United Church of Christ, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the United Church of Canada, the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, and Roman Catholic groups in Great Britain, Canada, Ireland, and Australia.