1 God, you are my God. I will earnestly seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My flesh longs for you, in a dry and weary land, where there is no water. 2 So I have seen you in the sanctuary, watching your power and your glory. 3 Because your loving kindness is better than life, my lips shall praise you. 4 So I will bless you while I live. I will lift up my hands in your name. 5 My soul shall be satisfied as with the richest food. My mouth shall praise you with joyful lips, 6 when I remember you on my bed, and think about you in the night watches. 7 For you have been my help. I will rejoice in the shadow of your wings. 8 My soul stays close to you. Your right hand holds me up. 9 But those who seek my soul to destroy it shall go into the lower parts of the earth. 10 They shall be given over to the power of the sword. They shall be jackal food. 11 But the king shall rejoice in God. Everyone who swears by him will praise him, for the mouth of those who speak lies shall be silenced.
Psalm 63 — O God, You Are My God
The dawn psalm of the Church, prayed at Lauds every Sunday, and the most physical description of longing in the Psalter.
What Psalm 63 Means
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.
Liturgical Use in the Catholic Church
Psalm 63 is prayed at Lauds every Sunday and on solemnities in the Liturgy of the Hours, and it has held that position since the earliest monastic offices. It is the Church's morning psalm in the strictest sense.
Praying Psalm 63 — A Simple Practice
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.
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