Lesson Five: Putting It All Together

So far in this series, we have been focusing on psalms of joy. But psalms have many moods, and where there is sun there are also shadows.

In the psalm we are about to sing, Psalm 63, we'll hear some of the darker emotional colors of the psalm tradition. We'll also take the next step in learning to sight sing a psalm using the simple, modern notation of New Camaldoli Monastery in Big Sur, Calif.

Let's

, with its antiphon:

Antiphon
In the shadow of your wings I rejoice, alleluia.

Psalm 63
O God, my God, at dawn I seek you,
for you my soul is thirsting, my flesh is longing,
like a dry and parched land longs for water.

I have gazed on you in the holy place,
to behold your might and your glory.
Better than life itself is your love,
my lips will sing your praise.

So I shall bless you all my life long,
lifting up my hands to invoke your name;
my soul will be filled as with rich feasting,
and my mouth will proclaim your praise.

I remember you as I lie on my bed,
on you I meditate through the watches of the night,
for you, O God, have come to aid me.

I rejoice in the shadow of your wings,
to you my soul has held fast,
you have sustained me by your right hand.

Doxology:
In the Spirit of Christ your Son,
the Church meditates on your glory,
through the watches of the night.

In the shadow of your wings I rejoice, alleluia.

This is a very poignant and personal psalm, a song of deep spiritual yearning. The imagery of the desert runs through it: "My soul is thirsting, my flesh is longing, like a dry and parched land longs for water."

This aching sense of absence is counterbalanced in the wonderfully comforting verse, which furnishes the antiphon for this psalm: "I rejoice in the shadow of your wings. To you my soul has held fast, you have sustained me by your right hand."

So the psalm sings of that place on that journey where the light and the dark are somehow very close together. The hunger is real; what we yearn for seems so far away, and yet in a dim and dark way we know it is also somehow holding us close. The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart expresses this paradox well when he says, "The eye with which you seek God is the eye with which God seeks you."

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