The House of the Lord

“How lovely is Your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty, for my soul longs and even faints for You.”

This song, based on Psalm 84, strikes a chord in the deepest part of my soul, where I desire to know God and to experience his presence. For the psalmist, the Lord’s “courts” were those of Jerusalem’s temple; perhaps we imagine Heaven when we hear of the Lord’s dwelling place. However, our faith tells us that God is closer than our next breath and that his kingdom is at hand. What if God is most present to us, not in a particular place or time, but in the depths of our souls where we most long for him? In short, what if we are God’s dwelling place?

Teresa of Avila writes in Interior Castle, “The soul of a righteous man is nothing but a paradise, in which, as God tells us, he takes his delight. For what do you think a room will be like which is the delight of a King so mighty, so wise, so pure and so full of all that is good? I can think of nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul and its great capacity.”

Perhaps we’ve heard the phrase “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit” so often that it’s become a cliché or an injunction to act morally. Yet truly God is present within us in a most profound way: he dwells in our souls through the Holy Spirit and in our bodies through the Eucharist. Aside from God himself, what could be more beautiful?

I invite you to spend time today praying about this. Ask the Lord to reveal his presence in you and in others, so that we may see the beauty and holiness of each person and glorify God because of it. Amen?