Evensong Meditation: Happy are they who dwell in the House of the Lord

A Meditation for Choral Evensong preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on March 8, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

I thought for this evening’s short meditation, we could look together at Psalm 84 and ponder what counsel it might have to offer for our Lenten Journey together—the journey into love, the pilgrimage to the Temple of the Heart, the putting on of the mind of Christ.

One of the questions I ask myself on a regular basis throughout the day actually comes from this psalm—“In whose house am I dwelling right now?” I find that it has the capacity to wake me up from my distracted slumber and interrupt the mechanical autopilot of drifting through life like one of George Romero’s zombies in Night of the Living Dead. Pausing, asking the question, and waiting for it to be answered is like a stick in the spokes of the thinking mind that rushes this way and that: pre-living what hasn’t happened yet and re-living what’s already happened. In the meantime, our precious, unrepeatable, fleeting life passes us by almost unawares.

When we ask that question, “In whose house am I dwelling?” and let the question call us into question, it’s amazing what starts to surface. Perhaps we notice we been grinding away at an old hurt or chewing on an unresolved relationship characterized by conflict. Perhaps we notice we’ve been daydreaming about a cruise on the Mexican Riviera while the coffee on our desk goes cold and e-mails pile up. “In whose house am I dwelling?” at the stoplight or in line at the grocery. “In whose house am I dwelling?” at the bedside of dying friend. “In whose house am I dwelling?” after we’ve turning off the evening news. Asking the question is rather like looking in the mirror and it shows us what we do. That’s the purpose of letting a question like that question you, to call you into question—to wake you up to what you do and to untrain your parrot.

My grandparents had a parrot who could answer the phone. It would ring. You’d take the phone off the receiver and Sailor would croak, “Hello! Hello! Mother it’s for you!” Now Sailor would also say a lot of other things—he got the name because he had a mouth like a Sailor—but the point is that as funny as his performance was, it was also kind of sad. It was awfully mechanical after all, and there was something depressingly Pavlovian about whole affair.

Sailor the Parrot is a good sign for us, though, of how we often sleepwalk through what the poet Mary Oliver calls our “wild and precious life.” Our innate capacity for compassionate response rather than mechanical reaction gets buried under a heap of habitual patterning. The wildness and preciousness of this short span of days gets domesticated, trained, and imprinted with a banal predictability.

Now the psalmist knows this, of course. He writes, “one day in your courts is better than a thousand in my own room.” Courts of the Lord versus the cramped enclosure of our own room. The room is that homemade self that seeks to find happiness, joy, peace, and satisfaction on its own terms, separate from God, with its requirements at the center of the picture dictating how everything should go. The psalmist knows that having our shoulds running the show is good way to guarantee suffering and dissatisfaction. We gripe about the way things or other people should be and miss the precious gift that is always on offer. We spend our energy trying to fix other people while ignoring the Christ that is already present. We huddle up in the room our thoughts construct and miss the astounding fact of our true situation which is nothing less than that we are always already standing in the courts of the Lord. Like swallow that builds a nest by the side of the altars, we already enjoy an intimacy and freedom with the Lord of Hosts. Remove your shoes, the Lord says to Moses, for the place you are standing is holy ground.

But life doesn’t often present itself to us that way, does it? Often it’s characterized by lack, by the perception that something is missing, by the plaintive story-line of if-only, by the sense that God is absent. Jacob exclaims, Surely God is in this place and I did not know it. Often, however, we sound a lot like anti-Jacobs—God is not in this place, and I know it. So the dropping of the question, “In whose house am I dwelling?” is really a way of trying to see with eyes of a child, with eyes attuned to gratitude, wonder, and awe, with eyes capable of perceiving the effervescent freshness of the lively, living God, the giver of life. Those eyes, washed clean with the balm of giftedness, see burning bushes everywhere. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes,

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes –
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries

What if we operated in this season of Lent as if God were actually present? What if we lived our lives in the faith and trust that God really is in this place even if we can’t perceive it as yet? What if we stepped out of the cramped quarters of the room our shoulds and preconceptions construct like castles in air and made the pilgrim’s journey to the Temple of the Heart? What if we practiced waking up to what we do and untraining our parrots, making conscious the ways we sleepwalk through life and made the choice to dwell instead in the courts of the Lord where swallows scissor over the altar and the desolate valley gushes forth as a spring?

The call is always to come home to the source of all Beauty, Goodness, and Truth who has made His home in us. The call is always to abide where He abides, to dwell where He dwells. That’s the source of true happiness, and blessing—to make a little space in our lives for God to get us. To let Jesus pray. To let Jesus pray in us. To let prayer pray within us. Happy are they who dwell in your house!