Psalm 63: O God, You Are My God

Psalm 63 is the psalm the Church says at dawn, and it has been used that way since at least the fourth century.

What makes it distinctive is that its longing is physical rather than abstract. The psalmist does not say he thinks about God often. He says his soul thirsts and his flesh faints, in a dry and weary land where there is no water. It is the language of dehydration, and it is chosen because thirst is the one appetite that cannot be reasoned with or postponed.

The turn comes quickly. Having named the thirst, the psalm moves to memory: I have seen you in the sanctuary. The desert is where he is; the sanctuary is what he knows. Prayer here is not the manufacture of feeling but the deliberate recollection of something already seen, said out loud in a place where nothing confirms it.

Then the line that has kept the psalm in daily use for sixteen centuries: your loving kindness is better than life. Not better than hardship. Better than life itself, said by someone in a wasteland.

The closing verses turn to the night watches, remembering God on the bed through the hours when the mind is least defended. The psalm covers the whole day it opens.

In the Liturgy of the Hours, Psalm 63 opens Morning Prayer on the first Sunday of the four-week psalter and on solemnities and feasts (for centuries the Roman Breviary sang it at Lauds every day), and it has held that position since the earliest monastic offices. It is the Church's morning psalm in the strictest sense.

Pray it first thing, before anything else has been said, which is what it was written for. Do not try to feel the thirst it describes; say the words on the days you feel nothing at all, because the psalm is spoken from a dry land and not from a good morning. The night verses at the end make it work equally well as a psalm for lying awake.