How lovely is thy dwelling place

Remember this song? We used this song in worship in our small church in the mid 80s and I haven’t heard it since then but it always comes back to me as a comfort.  I assume it is from Psalm 84. This song and Psalm 84 speak to me of the Original Man in John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. In his very first talk (p. 131) JP2 teaches on Mt 19:3-8:

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?”  He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. (ESV)

In this passage Jesus discusses divorce and repeats twice the expression to them of “from the beginning” (v. 3 and v.8). That is, from the beginning, before sin, before “hardness of heart,” before they had to leave the Garden. In Genesis 1:31 “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” As Jesus makes clear, this is where we are to look to understand ourselves as made in God’s loving image.

To me, the Psalmist in Psalm 84 doesn’t want to leave the Garden. His heart is not hard and he is content. From the Ted Sandquist song he says, “I would rather be a doorkeeper in your fold than to take my fate upon myself.”

Lord, break the hardness of our hearts, and lead us also to the place where “You are our Lover from the start and the highway to your City runs through my heart.”