The Responsorial Psalm says our deeper self longs for God.

Monday, 3/4/13

The Responsorial Psalm is taken from Psalm 42. It expresses the soul’s longing both to be with God and to be with the multitude of believers. Let’s look at verses 2, 3, 4, and five.

            2. As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God.

Spinoza wrote a great study he called his Ethics. It based all our needs and duties on our appetites for surviving as individuals and for surviving as a race. But can’t we agree with the Psalmist that our appetite for our maker is just as basic?

Paragraph 19 of the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World states, “The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God. The invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being.”  The Church there expresses its conviction that our appetite for God is with us from conception. The Psalm goes on:

3. My soul thirsts foe God, the living God. When can I go and see the face of  God?       

     

4. My tears have been my food day and night, as they ask daily, “Where is your God?”

The Psalmist feels that beneath our trivial surface consciousness there is a deeper self that longs for what really matters.

 5. Those times I recall as I pour out my soul, when I  went in procession with the crowd, I went with them to the house of God, amid loud cries.   

The Psalmist there says that the deeper selves in us long to be going up to the Father not alone, but in the company of all our brothers and sisters.