Live with God now
Psalm 27
“One thing I ask of the Lord; this I seek: to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life”
Sometimes the story of the Christian life is told as follows: live your life as well as you can, asking for forgiveness from God when you stumble, and when you die you will go to heaven and live with God.
So, what then is meant by this Psalm which asks to “dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life”? Surely, we dwell in the house of the Lord in heaven after we have died, not all the days of our lives. But no, God's call is so much greater than that. God wishes for us to dwell in Him here and now, not just in the afterlife. He reaches from His eternity into our everyday. He calls us to experience a foretaste of Heaven with Him on earth.
But what does it mean to dwell in the house of the Lord here on earth? St Paul the Apostle describes our bodies as “a temple of the Holy Spirit within you” (1 Corinthians 6:19), and St Augustine develops this in the story of his conversion “you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there” (Confessions, book 10). To dwell in the house of the Lord in our lives means to look inside ourselves. It means to listen to the call of God within our hearts. It means to allow space for quiet and to be transformed from within. The call to dwell in the house of the Lord is a call to relationship with God, here and now. And a relationship with God is built on time shared together; on speaking and listening; on asking for and doing things for one another. This call is not just for priests and nuns; for theologians; for “good” people; for people with time on their hands who don't have jobs and children and struggles. This call is for all of us.
The God we find within us is all that we are seeking, is the answer to every question and the source of all joy.
A meditation written by Natalie Dennehy, a parishioner at St Augustine's, Hammersmith
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Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone. Col 4:6