I finally noticed Psalm 63
There’s no Psalm I’ve read more often than Psalm 63, but this morning I finally listened to what Psalm 63 has to say.
How often I find myself thirsting for God, seeking (hopefully not like Lazarus’ persecutor) just a drop of God’s soothing presence. And yet here’s the answer, in the same Psalm that I’ve read scores of times.
David too finds himself in a dry and dreary land, thirsting for God. How does he slake this thirst?
He chooses to recommit himself to praising God in the wilderness where he finds himself this morning and where he lies down to rest in the evening. To praise with his lips, and to lift up his arms. When David praises, he finds his soul satisfied, and not merely satisfied, but richly so.
When our mouth is filled with praise, our soul is likewise full.
Not the other way around.
Yet another way that praise works!
There’s some confusion about the tense of David’s reference to gazing upon God in the Sanctuary. The Grail translation in the Psalter expresses it in the present “So I gaze upon…” while the Revised Grail ambiguously says “I have come before you…” Many other English translations similarly confuse the tense, but the general consensus seems to be that this present-tense is inaccurate, and David is remembering the time when he could come before the Lord in the Sanctuary. Either way, it is safe enough to add Eucharistic adoration to the prescription for joy-full-ness.
Father Patrick Boylan has an excellent commentary here: http://thedivinelamp.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/father-patrick-boylan-on-psalm-63-for-sunday-mass-june-20/