Ps. 84.2 (a consuming beauty)

My soul yearns / even wastes away
for the courts / of Yhwh
my heart / and my flesh / cry out
to the living god. 

We gestured toward it in the previous reflection, but here we need to spend more time reflecting on the nature of God’s glorious beauty and how that beauty affects those attracted to it. A preliminary: we have noted, particularly in Psalm 48, that the Temple, although it should be, is not an object of beauty to everyone. Rather, for some it is an object of horror. What we also need to highlight is the fact that for many it is an object of indifference—neither beautiful nor horrendous. These are simply ambivalent towards the Temple. Along this spectrum, oddly perhaps, I think that the ambivalence is the worst. In the words of Revelation: it is better to be cold (react with horror) than lukewarm (to be ambivalent). For those who perceive the Temple as an object of horror they are still making a fundamentally aesthetic judgment; in other words, they do perceive the authority residing in the Temple that makes it expressive. Through an act of authorial judgment they can have their horror turned into a yearning. They have an aesthetic sense, it is just disordered. For those who are ambivalent, however, much more needs to be done. They, in a sense, need to be re-created. They need a ‘new heart’. Their aesthetic sense is not disordered; it isn’t working. They are like the person who can experience an astonishing work of art and be largely indifferent to it. Their being simply does not register or respond to it. The point to all of this is that this psalm is composed entirely from the perspective of someone with an intensely active aesthetic perception. These lines, and the following verses, originate from someone who is attuned to the ‘arena of beauty’; they know beauty like they know a person and its consequent effects. Which takes us (finally) to the second verse. 

Yearning and wasting. It is crucial to perceive that the Temple is causing this response in the psalmist. It is an object of such perfect beauty that it, quite literally, ravishes him to be exiled from its presence. It is not the psalmist’s ‘central being’ but his entire being that has been caught up into the pull of the Temple—his heart and his flesh. It consumes him. There is no remainder. There is no neutral ground, no space within which the psalmist can inhabit that some part of him can find rest.  The Temple’s beauty is both absolutely central and total. As such, to be away from it, is to be in a realm of ‘yearning and wasting’. Yearning, in that his entire being wants to be in communion with it. Wasting, in that to be away from the Temple is to be, in a very real sense, in a realm of de-creation. This is the effect of Temple-beauty.