“How Lovely Are Your Dwelling Places”
[“How lovely are Your dwelling places, O Lord of hosts! My soul yearns and longs for the courts of the Lord; my body and soul sing for joy to the living God. . . .How blessed are those who dwell in Your house! They are ever praising You” (Ps 84:1-4).]
O Lover,
Part of my preparation for the 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time Sunday last was listening to movement #4 of Ein Deutsches Requiem (Op 45) by Johannes Brahms the text of which is taken from Psalm 84. That particular wedding of text and score yet again drew me into the splendor of You.
But now something had shifted, a movement having implications for the poetic image of “dwelling places,” of references to “Your house.” Whether the celestial vaults of my youth or the chronically lingering metaphysical distances of my midlife, there had remained an aura of separation, even remoteness, about You and Your “dwelling places.” Challenging all of this compartmentalizing in this my second (or 123rd!) conversion was my seeing, as if for the first time, the scale of Your Lógos (“Word”) enfleshed (Jn 1:14), Your “tabernacling” destination amidst humankind and, by implication, the cósmos (Apoc 21:3). I was being shown that the venue of all that I had ever glimpsed about You, O Lover, was this planet and its neighborhood, however neglected, ravaged, and dismissed as “prolegomenon” and/or “secular.” Indeed, it had come to me that the core of the impact of the Cosmic Christ was Your disposition toward and relationship with materiality, and that the central characterization of the creation is that it is of the Immanuel (“[You] with us”) sort.
This shift for me is not unfoldding without Your guides and acolytes. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) of the “charged” world, “dappled things,” and those “lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his” is one of these, fellow Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) of the “Cosmic Christ” and “Omega Point” another. Yet another guiding guru has been the non-dualism pervading the Vedantic legacy of India and its penetrating spiritual diaspora. Encompassing, coterminous with, and yet vastly surpassing all such escorts is Your Spirit who (Hopkins again) “over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
Accordingly, lest only the rocks remain to cry out (Lk 19:40), I have sought to sing of the closing of the offending “metaphysical distance” by becoming more alert to fresh (for me) language and images for You, all both vastly inadequate and existentially necessary: e.g., immanence, pan-en-theism, embedded. In all of this the tone of the intra-Triune Mystérium (e.g., circumincéssion [“interpenetration”], perichorésis [“circular agapaic dance”], co-inherence) is imprinting upon the relationship between Creator and creation. We only experience You as Self-entangling in our creaturely thicket.
In short, I have increasingly been becoming aware of Your dwelling places, “Your house,” and they are us, all of us gifted with being! Wherever else You may be, Your habitation of choice is here; whenever else, Your kaíros is now. Revel in our graced splendor, Your gift to us of loveliness, O Lover! In the poetic language of Juan de la Cruz’s “Romances,” the aggregate of the dwelling places of which Brahms sings is Your “palace for the bride.” For the Christ-modeled incarnationalist, Augustine’s firewall against the mingling of Creator and creature notwithstanding, it cannot be otherwise.
So let all of us sing on, Johannes, your text from the Psalter: we, all of us Your dwelling places, “are ever praising You.”
