Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 84

“Blessed are those who dwell in your house; 

they are ever praising you.”

My mother thought the world of the college where I spent most of my professional life, and it’s right that she did—all three of her children went here and many of her grandchildren. She remembered the college’s founder fondly, as well as its second president. Her son taught here for thirty years. She believed in Dordt College. But let’s be clear: she lived 500 miles away.

My wife worked in financial aid, my daughter still does work there, same office as her mother, in fact. My wife and daughter are as human as anyone else on this terra firma, as am I. When the three of us talked about the college where we all worked, we don’t speak as wistfully, as romantically, as my mother does. Of course, she’s 500 miles away, or did I say that already?

Absence can make the heart grow fonder in institutions, just as in love. And—not to empty the cliché bin—familiarity has been known to breed some feisty contempt.

Benedictine monasteries are trendy places these days, in part because fine writers like Kathleen Norris make them seem a bromide to the desperation of our lives. But her own work makes clear that people don’t check their sin at the door when they walk into the abbey. I know churches where preachers on staff can barely speak to each other. The average term of office for a youth pastor today is little more than a fortnight, I’m told, in part because so many of them can’t get along with their often less cool superiors. Churches are not heaven.

Distance is sometimes delightful, comfortable. Landscapes can be beautiful; close-ups can be brutal. I’m not all that sure the Psalmist is talking about a building—that’s what I’m saying.

If what this verse emphasis were true, what do we do with Eli, the priest at the door of the temple? By all accounts, he was a fine man, but he couldn’t control his boys, who dallied indecorously with the women who worked right there. Neither Hophni and Phinehas, nor their paramours, despite the immediacy of their temple tasks, were “ever praising” God, as the Psalmist so dreamily envisions here in verse three.

Psalm 84 is an exile psalm, and its exaltation of the temple is, in a way, but a mirror image of the horrific emotional deficit the psalmist feels when he’s not where he wants to be. So he wants what he can’t have. He longs to return to a place far away, a place where he can’t go, where everything is perfect, where the pious are all praising God.

Is there such a place? Only in your dreams.

I don’t know what Hebrew word Bible translators located in this verse and then converted into our dwell, but that choice feels right to me because the roots of the word dwell in Old English and Old Frisian are, oddly enough, in wandering. To dwell is a phrase that has buried within it a history of having wandered, of having been apart. That’s precisely the position of the psalmist. He wants badly what he can’t have.

And it’s us too, even though there’s no sacred temple locked up in my memory. Three- count ‘em, three—women we know well are doing very poorly right now, trying to fight the cancer that not only threatens but already cripples. They’re not just skirmishing. We’re talking all-out war.

A man who sat here not twenty feet from this chair not long ago took a nap a week or so ago and never woke up. Sixty killed yesterday when a suicide bomber did his thing in Baghdad. Hundreds of Cubans are in Panama, trying to hike to the U.S., whole families, darling little kids. Millions are fleeing Syria.

Sometimes we feel horribly exiled and we wish so badly to dwell in the House of the Lord.

“Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you.”

Lord Jesus, come quickly.