Psalm 16

Psalm 16 offers a prayer of fidelity to God and for protection. 

The language of place is prevalent in this psalm: God is the place the psalmist turns for refuge (v. 1); God provides the “path of life” (v. 11). For the psalmist, God is both journey and destination.

The parceling out of a place of one’s own is also named, as the psalmist says: “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage” (v. 6). In other words, the surveying lines denoting the psalmist’s home land are pleasant; they are connected to an ancestral home of sufficiency and give thanks to God for it. Or maybe, God’s own self is the inherited goodly place for the psalmist. 

I wonder what this psalm means for those who migrate: who may have been alienated from their inherited land, or who may be looking for new “pleasant places” to dwell. As theologian Mary Emily Duba describes it, God provides “good place” for those who are displaced—perhaps, for some, God provides the only good place. [1] When no stability of place or home is available, God is the refuge and path of life. From one’s being placed in the heart of God comes the confidence of being at home, even on the journey. 

God promises a place of safety, and the psalmist prays in confidence that God will not give them up to “Sheol, or let your faithful one see the pit” (v. 10). Even in the face of death, God promises that death will not be alienation from a place of life. God promises “good place” and a home.

Finally, it is hard not to see current events in the psalmist’s condemnation of “those who choose another god” who “multiply their sorrows”—do we not see “their drink offerings of blood” in the turn to violence in our current culture, both in wars abroad (that force innocent people into death and displacement) and in the cruelty of immigration detention and incarceration at home? 

We do not turn to a god who multiplies sorrows. We look for refuge and home in God, the God who promises good place, a home, and the path of life for all who journey and all who suffer.

[1] Mary Emily Duba, “God is Here,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, August 2018, https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1603/files/Duba_uchicago_0330D_14500.pdf.

Hannah Bowman is a member of the Episcopal Migration Caucus who lives in Los Angeles, the founder of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons, and the author of Abolition Ecclesiology: A Spatial Theology for a Church Against Prisons (forthcoming from Fortress Press in November 2026).