For you my soul is thirsting, O Lord, my God.
That was the response we repeated in between the verses of today’s Psalm, following today’s first reading. Psalm 62 (63 in Hebrew numbering) is surely one of the most loved and lovely of all the Psalms. It’s very familiar to anyone who recites Morning Prayer of the Divine Office, because it’s given there for every Sunday and feast day. The old Israelite who wrote it so many centuries ago speaks, movingly and beautifully, for all of us: putting into words his very human, very natural but also very much graced hunger and thirst for God. Without any polite preliminaries he comes straight to the point, boldly and directly addressing God; daring even to call him “my God”, and presuming his prayer will be heard.
The Psalm has a title, which tells us that it’s “of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah”. The scholars tell us that the titles were added later, but this one is helpful, in that we can imagine David fleeing for his life from Saul, or maybe later from Absalom. He’s alone in the desert, a friendless fugitive, without resources or supplies of any sort, facing death from his enemies, or from thirst, or maybe even from wild animals. Yet David cannot forget the words and the anointing of the prophet Samuel. He knows that God wants him to be King of Israel, and as such to renew the Covenant made first through Abraham, and then through Moses.
So David turns to his God, with images of desert thirst readily to hand. But David’s need here points to the radical need every human person has for God. God made us; he upholds us every moment in being; we are going to him. Our life here is so fragile, so beset with ills, so easily compromised! But God is eternal; he is also all-powerful and unchanging. We know also that he’s love and mercy and beauty and goodness and truth. We know it pleases him when we stand before him and pray. We know that he sees us and hears us. We know he wants to bless us, and does so. So the thirst for God of which David speaks here evokes a craving that comes from all that is best and deepest in us. It’s the longing of an exile for his homeland, or of a lover for his beloved, or maybe of a child separated from his mother.
On the other hand: we know that all too often our minds are so cluttered up by our preoccupations and worries, our cares and pains and distractions, that we fail to give God even a thought. Then the words of this Psalm can give us a jolt, and make us realise how far we have slipped from the c, or the “Godward” attitude we should always have, and really want to have, all the time. So at once with the Psalmist we renew our prayer, and we feel relief for having done so.
We Christians of course have more reason to call out to our God in trust and love than ever David did. For we have been baptised into the death and resurrection of Jesus. In him we already have the status of adopted Sons and Daughters of this God who is so far above us, and yet also so close. We belong to him, and he to us. So we are able to live always in intimacy with him, calling out to him in complete confidence: Our Father!
Our Psalm goes on: I have come before you in the Sanctuary…
Where does the Psalmist find his God? He knows well that God is both everywhere and nowhere. God cannot in any way be contained or restricted. Still, the thoughts of an Israelite will instinctively go in the first place to the Jerusalem Temple, house of God, house of prayer, place of worship, and of encounter. We too, analogously, instinctively seek out a Church building. We know Christ is present there in the Blessed Sacrament. We find there also the assembly and companionship of faithful believers, and we come to attend liturgical worship ultimately sanctioned by God himself. And once there: we praise God; and precisely this becomes our joy, and our nourishment, and we find it gives us life. Here also the proper focus of our life is restored, and we repair what is by far the most important relationship in our life, which is that with God.
The Psalm goes on, until remarkably, in verse 5 the image switches to its opposite. Instead of desert, barrenness, thirst, imminent death, we have a banquet. My soul shall be filled, he says (literally), with fatness and richness. No longer a fugitive on the run, the singer seems now securely at home, lying at rest on his own bed. Yet this Psalmist is not ready to give himself up to slumber. He stays awake, meditating on his God; acknowledging what he owes to God’s protection and help; still longing, craving to see his God face to face.
For us Christians, the secular world which knows nothing of Christ really can seem like a barren and hostile desert. Stuck in the midst of that, we long for Christ, our Lord, our love, our life: the fountain of living waters (cf. e.g. Ps 35/36:9; Jer 2:13; Apoc 21:6; John 7:38). Or with St. Paul we cry: I long to depart and to be with Christ! (Phil 1:23). But, like Frodo and Sam, we do have help and supplies to carry us through this world until that blessed moment arrives. We can feed, as in a banquet, on holy reading, prayer, meditation, good example, encouragement, exhortation. We can be hugely consoled also by moments of felt grace that seem to bring God very near, and to make God apparently more real than anything else whatever. Above all of course we feed on the banquet of the Holy Eucharist: Jesus Christ himself, giving himself, uniting himself with us.
Let me end this now by just mentioning the French Carmelite nun St. Elisabeth of the Trinity. We don’t celebrate her here, but today happens to be her feast day! She was a younger contemporary of St. Therese of Lisieux; quite similar in many ways, yet also very different. Elisabeth’s great gift was to understand and explain how God the Holy Trinity dwells within us: so we always have access to him. And if we dwell with God, and God dwells with us, then we have already found heaven! Elisabeth died as a young woman in 1906 of the horrible wasting Addison’s disease. Her brief last words seemed to sum up her life, her message, her faith. “I go” she said “to light, to love, to life.” May all of us know that this same light, love, life in God is also is our own destination; and may we embrace this great gift with continuous joy.