Summary
Our hearts long for God and are restless until they rest in Him. We can experience God’s presence even more deeply than David did because of the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. We should let ourselves rest in God’s protecting presence.
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Reflective Study Guide Questions
” O God, … my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where no water is.”
Ps. 63:1
1. What is significant about a “wilderness” compared to a “desert”? How might that be an encouragement to us, as we make our way through the weeks of Lent?
2. What are three things you can do this week to intentionally cultivate a “listening silence” in your life?
3. Where does Psalm 63 connect to your life? How do you need God today?
4. In his longing, David intentionally focused his thoughts on God instead of on his own need. When you think of God, what attributes come to mind? What has he done, that you can praise and thank him for?
Pray with the Word (Lectio Divina)
Continue praying with Psalm 63 using this guide:
PRAY
Come Holy Spirit, speak to me as I read your Word.
READ
Read Psalm 63 several times. What word or words stand out to you? Write them here and pause a moment with them. Receive them in your heart, listening closely for the prompting of the Holy Spirit.
REFLECT
What does the passage mean? Is there anything you want to remember from Sarah’s reflection? Do you have any new insights? Meditate where you feel drawn, and keep your heart open to hear.
RESPOND
As you continue your meditation, allow it to become a conversation between you and the Lord. If you find your voice in the words of the psalm itself, pray it with intention. Or if he speaks to your heart, answer. Talk to the Lord about what you hear.
REST
Remain quiet for a moment in his loving embrace.
PRAY
Lord, inspire me to read your Scriptures and to meditate upon them day and night. I beg you to give me real understanding of what I read, that I in turn may put its precepts into practice. Yet I know that understanding and good intentions are worthless, unless rooted in your graceful love. So, I ask that the words of Scripture may also be not just signs on a page, but channels of grace into my heart. Amen. (Origen of Alexandria)
Put Word into Action – “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.” (Lk 11:28)
- What will you do this week to turn your heart toward God? Can you set aside time to seek him in prayer, perhaps before the Blessed Sacrament? Take Psalm 63 with you. Let it meet you in the place of your longing and give you words to praise.
- For a way to more deeply meditate on the readings throughout the week either leading up to or following Sunday, download 40 Days in the Word: Pondering the Scriptures for Lent & Easter – Yr A.
- You might also like “10 Ways to Keep the Word in Your Heart”
Text: Praying with the Psalms: In the Wilderness with David
Hi, I am Sarah Christmyer, helping Catholics to learn and love and live the word of God. I’m so glad to be with you for this Pray More Lenten Retreat. Over the next, the course of the next few weeks, we are going to dive into the scriptures. We’re going to look at some of the gospel passages that we hear on Sundays and join Jesus in those passages to learn more about our thirst and also His call. And we’re going to pray together with particular Psalms that will help us to tap into our own need and draw close to the Lord.
But first, we’re going to take a look at why creating a kind of an internal wilderness in our own hearts through our length and observances is such a good way to start our practice this Lent.
Opening Prayer
So let’s start in prayer. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, we long to know you and I pray for every person who’s listening here that you will meet them in your word, that you will lift their hearts and satisfy them with living water. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Why Do We Become Thirsty?
So, living water. Have you ever been really, really thirsty? It’s kind of a funny thing to ask, but I think that in America we are never very far from water of some kind. So I don’t think I’m thirsty very often, but I can remember a time, one in particular, when I was a teenager and we went on a long hike up a mountain and I absolutely refused to carry the metal canteen that my mother said was going to help keep me from being thirsty for the day. I did not want that thing over my shoulder, and I would be perfectly fine, thank you very much.
Which of course, I was not. I was just dying of thirst by the time we got to the top of that hill. And I can just remember the longing that I had and the desire I had, it just overcame every other thing that I could have been doing at the time. I just needed to have water. And it makes me think, you know, God, why do You let us be thirsty? You know, God made us, why does He let us be thirsty? Well, Saint Augustine had something to say about that. He said, “Lord, you have put salt on our lips that we may thirst for you. Lord, you have put salt on our lips that we may thirst for you.”
It’s that important. What else did he say? “You’ve made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.” That’s a similar thing. We are made for God and ultimately He is the only thing that is going to satisfy us. Unfortunately, we forget, don’t we? You know, we try to satisfy ourselves with other things. And so that in a way, that’s what Lent is all about, right? It’s about a reset. We fast, we pray, we give alms, all these things so that we can kind of create a bit of a desert or a wilderness, a hunger, a thirst within ourselves so that we can better turn our attention toward God and yearn for Him and be satisfied by Him.
The Desert and the Wilderness
So I was thinking about how, what a great metaphor that is. This dryness, this wilderness desert for what we do in Lent. And I remember when, probably about a decade ago, I was in Israel and our guide took us to the edge of the Judean wilderness, which as you know, is the place where the Holy Spirit took Jesus off to be tempted by the devil, right? It’s a place where He hungered for 40 days. So we sat there and we had time to think about that passage and to pray and just to be quiet in the wilderness. And I looked across that expanse of it. You know, it’s not a desert like Moab, it’s like rocky dirt. It was dry, it was brown. After a while, all you want to do is look up. You’re like, I need to see something, I need to hear something. It just draws this feeling of thirst out of you.
But as we talked about it later, I kept calling it a desert. And our guide insisted, “No, Sarah, you can’t call it a desert. This is wilderness.” Well, what’s the difference? I think it’s important here because a desert is nothing but sand and you can pour as much water as you like on sand and nothing will grow, okay? But in the wilderness, wilderness is more uncultivated area. Sure it can be dry, it can be barren, but there are seeds, there’s potential for life.
So in the Judean wilderness, after the winter rains, grasses and so on will spring up and sure, they’ll dry out. You know, it’s only green for a short time because the sun is hot and the winds come and it’s exposed. But there’s always something for the goats and the sheep to find in the cracks. And so this is a place, it’s a grazing land. It’s a grazing land. Definitely not the kind of desert we think of. And I like that because that’s what we want to create in our souls, okay, in lent. Our souls have potential to spring to life when they’re watered with the word of God. So we create this emptiness, this quiet in our souls, this hunger so that we can turn to God and then have the rain of His spirit, and the rain of the word of God fall on us and bring us to life. The wilderness has been a really big part of Israel’s history.
If you think about it all the way back to the time of Moses, he was in the wilderness grazing his father-in-law’s sheep when God appeared to him in the burning bush and where he heard the word of God spoken to him, telling him what his name was, you know, giving him his directions. He was in the wilderness at that time. Then we have Elijah at another point. He’s in the wilderness when the Lord made himself pass before him in a fire, in a whirlwind, in thunder and so on. And he didn’t hear the Lord’s voice in any of that until it all stopped and it was completely quiet.
Think of the stillness of the wilderness and what did Elijah hear? That still small voice like a whisper. In Hebrew, it’s the sound of a slender silence. I love that. It’s a sound that your ears have to be yearning toward. You have to be paying attention and looking for it. You have to be listening for it in our order to hear it.
A Fertile Land
So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the word for wilderness in Hebrew comes from a root word that means word. So the word wilderness can mean of the word or from the word, and it’s in the wilderness that Israel, the children of Israel heard the word of God and became his people. Okay, very special place, the wilderness. And there’s something about it, I think that we need in order to be able to hear and respond to God properly. And maybe that’s why there’s so much wilderness in the promised land. You know, here’s the land that God prepared for His people to go into and half of its wilderness. Why? Maybe it’s because He wanted them there so that they would seek Him, just like God put salt on our mouths, you know?
So we would thirst for Him. There’s something about the wilderness that helps us to seek the Lord. And it’s fertile, it’s not barren. So when we do seek Him and we do listen to His voice and we hear it, it can fall on the kind of ground that will spring to life, okay? Just like, I think that’s the promise of Easter is to bring us new life out of death. It’s what we’re looking forward to these 40 days. So to help us do that, scripture has given us Psalms and in particular, I’m thinking of Psalm 63. I think you’ll find that this one’s familiar. It was part of the daily prayers of the early church. They called it the Mourning hymn. And Saint John Christendom said something interesting about it. He said, “The spirit and soul of the whole book of Psalms is contracted into this psalm.” So Psalm 63, it’s kind of important. Might be a good one for you to weave into your devotions in some way and really get very familiar with. I would like to read it with you. We’ll do it kind of three ways. I’ll just read it to you so you get an idea of what it’s about. Then we’ll go through and reflect on it bit by bit and then we’ll pray with it together. So get out your Bible if you have one, because I think it will help you if you can read along throughout this. And I will be reading from the RSV Catholic Edition, but you can read from whatever version you have and I’m sure it will be very close. So Psalm 63. A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.
Psalm 63
“O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water is. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name.
My soul is feasted as with marrow and fat, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips when I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night; for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.”
I think I’ll actually continue half of the way through verse eight. “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.”
Breaking Down Psalm 63
Beautiful psalm. So as it begins, this is a Psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah. Now, David was in the wilderness of Judah a number of times, notably probably fleeing from his life. At the beginning of his life, after he was anointed king, there was already a king, King Saul. And Saul was not happy that David would be around. And so he actually was trying to kill David. So David spent quite a bit of time in the wilderness fleeing from in exile kind of, from Saul. Then later on, much later in his life, his son Absalom rebelled against him and David was out again fleeing through the wilderness. So these are times of great need. He’s in bodily danger, probably thirsty and hungry also, but he really needs help. He needs God, he needs protection.
So when we read this psalm, like with others, you know, we do not have to be fleeing for our life or feeling hungry and thirsty in order to relate to this. Any life situation that leaves us in need of God that has us crying out for help. You know, we can bring into the Psalm and pray it. So say you’ve lost your job, you can’t pay your bills. You’re struggling with a new bad diagnosis or someone in your family has just died, a loved one you’ve lost. Or maybe just your life seems like a desert right now. There’s just not that much holding your interest, you’re kicking your heels. Just wondering, you know, what is my life for? Why am I here? Whatever the case is, we need a God. You know, that is our condition. We need God. And so we can say with David.
“O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where no water is.”
Because whatever that situation is, it feels an awful like physical thirst. So we can make that connection here. This is really intense longing that David is describing, and I love what he does with it. You know, he’s not complaining. He turns to God and he reminds him, “Oh God, you are my God.” Okay? He’s not praying to some impersonal God, however great he is, who may or may not be to help him. You are my God. You’re mine, I’m yours. We belong to each other and therefore, help me. You know, I need you.
Look, just if you have your Bible open in front of you, look down through the Psalm and just notice how many times you see the word, “I” or “my” or “me” and the word, “you,” “your” and so on. I think it’s something like maybe 15 or 17 times each, every single practically. This is a very personal interchange, head-to-head between David and the God who loves him and who he loves and who he’s turning to now for help. And this need is so great that it’s involving all of his being, okay? You see at the beginning, it’s his soul and his flesh. Later he talks about his hands and his mouth. This is body, mind, spirit, everything about him focused together on God. And it’s also everywhere that he is. So when he is in the wilderness, when he is in the temple, when he is in his bed. Everywhere, 24/7, okay? Night and day, always this longing is consuming him and is pointing him toward God. Well, I love what David does for that longing. He turns to God and then next he remembers. It’s a key thing, he remembers.
“So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.” So he’s remembering a time when he was in God’s presence, maybe when he felt longing either for God or for something else, but doesn’t really matter because God satisfied him in the past and God’s love is better than life. He goes on to say. “So my lips will praise you. I will bless you as long as I live. I will lift up my hands and call on your name.”
I think this is really a great thing to do. You know, when we are longing for whatever it is, lesser things than God to remember, remember God’s love. Find ways to look on His power and glory, you know, name it, praise and call on His name. Call on His name. David couldn’t get to the temple, but he called God to come to him where he was. We can do that very same thing because when you call on the name of the Lord, it invokes his presence to be with us. And then when David does this, he invokes God’s presence and he’s satisfied. He says, “My soul is feasted as with marrow and fat.” Right, not crackers and water, it is marrow and fat? Fill in whatever big great meal would most satisfy you. “My soul is feasted as with marrow and fat,” he says.
As Christians, we can look at this in a whole new dimension that David couldn’t even imagine. You know, we can enter God’s presence physically. We can actually be in His real presence and we can feast on Him, His body and His blood, and it can satisfy us. I mean, what an incredible gift that we have to be able to not just sit before the Eucharist, to pray before it, to be in His presence, but also to eat it, to feed on Him and be satisfied. And we can carry that with us. You know, David, David did. He goes on, “From being feasted,” he says,
“My mouth praises you with joyful lips when I think of you upon my bed and meditate on you in the watches of the night, for you have been my help and in the shadow of your wings, I sing for joy.” So he’s being feasted in God’s presence. And then that staying with him even at night when he’s in bed. And I don’t know about you at night, sometimes I can’t sleep. And that’s when all the fears come and the longings and you know, things get kind of mixed up and confused and a little bit scary sometimes.
But what David finds is that thinking about God during the day, it gets carried with him into the night and he can, he says, “For you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.” This shadow of your wings is a lovely image In those times, it might refer to a mother hen, maybe raising her wings so that the chickens can come in and be safe and be warm. It’s also the wings in the temple that are over the Ark of the Covenant, over the presence of God. And maybe they represent that overarching warming, safe, comforting, protecting presence that God has of his people. “In the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.” And then he clings to God and is upheld.
So maybe we can do that too. You know, in the night when we’re thinking of God and imagine His wings over us protecting us and then clinging to Him. That’s a very intimate thing, isn’t it? This clinging, cling to God and be upheld because God will uphold us. And I love the movement within this psalm, from the point of danger in the desert and thirst through meditating on the Lord and being brought to joy and being upheld. Just lovely. So we can do this too, you know? Look to God, remember His love, praise Him, place ourselves in His care, sing for joy, cling to Him and be upheld. Praying the Psalm will help with that.
So I hope that you’ll spend time praying with it on your own. But in the meantime, let’s just pray with it together. And as I read, put yourself in the place of David. Put yourself right here in the Psalm, in the wilderness, whatever wilderness you’re feeling. Imagine yourself saying the words and pray with them. Make David’s cry your own, and let this Psalm meet you where you are, and then lift you up to the Lord. Let’s pray.
Closing Prayer
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Lord, open our hearts to listen to your word. May it drop like rain into the wilderness of our hearts and bring life. A psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah.
“O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water is. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name. My soul is feasted as with marrow and fat, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips when I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night; for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy. My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.”
What word do you hear spoken to your heart? Take a minute to respond to the Lord whether you are lifting your soul to Him in thirst or raising your hands in blessing and praise or clinging to Him for His support.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end. Amen. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit Amen.
What will you do this week to turn your heart to God? I have a few suggestions if they’re helpful. First of all, as you fast and pray and as you give alms, you know, if you’re tempted to grumble, use it instead as an opportunity to turn your face toward God and listen to Him. Next, set aside some time to seek Him to be in His presence.
So whether that is in front of the blessed sacrament just prior to going to mass, whether it’s in your living room, whatever it is, set aside some specific time to seek His presence.
And I suggest that you take Psalm 63 along with you. It’s a wonderful Psalm, and if you pray it over and over again and allow it to become part of you, I think that it will meet you right where you are and lift your heart in praise to God.
So whatever you do, God bless you, particularly as you read His word this week.
About Sarah Christmyer
Sarah Christmyer is a Catholic author, Bible teacher, and speaker who delights in helping people meet Christ in Scripture—especially through lectio divina. Her guided journal Create in Me a Clean Heart has led thousands to pray the Penitential Psalms during Lent, sparking genuine conversion of heart. She is general editor of the Living the Word Catholic Women’s Bible (Ave Maria Press) and co-developer and founding editor of The Great Adventure Catholic Bible study program. Sarah has written or co-written more than a dozen books and Bible studies, and teaches as adjunct faculty at Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia. She shares Scripture reflections at ComeIntoTheWord.com.