This I Seek

“One thing I ask of the LORD
this I seek:
To dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
That I may gaze on the loveliness of the LORD
and contemplate his temple.”
—Psalm 27:4

I’m not sure that many of us could say, given one thing to ask of the Lord, that we’d choose to hang out in church all the days of our lives. This psalm, attributed to David, expresses a longing for the Lord represented in his desire to be in the temple, where in Jewish thought God dwelled in a particularly immediate sort of way.

It was this immediacy of God’s presence that must have inspired David’s singular desire. David longs to be in the temple because that is where, he believes, he can encounter God in the most direct sort of way. Again, we find the passionate voice of the lover in David’s yearning to be with the Lord. David longs to “gaze” on God’s “loveliness.” Later in the psalm, he cries out, “Come, says my heart…seek God’s face; your face, Lord, do I seek!”

What does it mean to seek the face of Pure Spirit, to gaze on the loveliness of Being itself? David is taking us deep into the experience of intimacy with God, where only the language of lovers can express the inexpressible sense of oneness that God offers his Beloved. For David, the temple is the bridal chamber where Lover and Beloved are united.

Our Easter journey of discipleship is not meant to be the drudgery of religious routine and dry doctrine. God is calling us to fall in love with him, to dissolve the worries and anxieties of our ego into the pure bliss of union. Church is not merely an institution of obligation and order, but the gateway to a lover’s garden of spiritual intimacy and delight where we may gaze on God’s loveliness, and see our own loveliness reflected in his desire for us.

Beloved, let my ego defenses fall away and allow me to discover my heart’s one true desire! Amen.