As I awaken on the Feast of the Ascension, I turned to my Breviary and began to pray the Liturgy of the Hours. I’ll be reflecting regularly on morning prayer in these spaces and on Night prayer in the late evenings. This is the piece that spoke to me today from Psalm 63:
O God, you are my God, for you I long; *
for you my soul is thirsting.
My body pines for you *
like a dry, weary land without water.
So I gaze on you in the sanctuary *
to see your strength and your glory.
As we continue to long to feel closer to God during this pandemic, I’d ask the question more deeply: Didn’t we always long to be closer to God even before the pandemic hit? And if we didn’t, weren’t we missing the boat?
For my own sake, I pray that I might always have a longing to understand God just a bit more. The ineffable mystery that cannot be comprehended fully is always something that my body should “pine for.”
In this pandemic, how am I creating new sanctuaries in which I might gaze more frequently on the Lord? Perhaps these new sanctuaries might also bring the Lord more deeply into my heart?
As we end our time of Morning Prayer, here’s one of the new sanctuaries that I found from Prayerscapes:
May today be a blessed Ascension Thursday for all.