Thanks to the monks and their beautiful morning prayer, I’ve started learning some of the psalms a bit better over the past couple of months. I’ve even found myself looking forward to certain lines and images that recur between Lauds and Vigils.
One of my new favorites – and a verse profoundly appropriate to our Advent journeys – comes from Psalm 24: “Oh gates, lift high your heads. Grow higher, ancient doors. Let him enter, the king of glory.”
At first, the images struck me as particularly strange. Instructing gates to lift their heads felt like such an odd, stubborn use of personification, and following this with an injunction to “grow higher” only compounded the oddness by commanding something impossible to effect at will, even for a living creature.
But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to love the way these verses invite a jubilant hope in the face of earthly limitations. Ultimately, even “ancient doors” require a miraculous intervention in order to embrace the divine. Our longest-standing and most impressive structures – those ancient doors that protect or admit, that stand as symbols of identity and culture – can’t begin to accommodate the King of Glory until He, himself, intervenes with what is otherwise impossible: “Grow higher, ancient doors. Let him enter, the king of glory.”
These verses resonate with an incarnational joy particularly appropriate to Advent, as we await the coming of our God and King at Christmas. We’re used to talking about God’s profound nearness to each of us, but this reality should be so staggering that it buckles the limits of rhetoric and unassisted reason. Precisely because the best that we can build or become is nevertheless too narrow and too limited to allow Him entrance, we learn how tenderly God loves us – for He adopts and transforms our very humanness, giving us access to His divine life. He intervenes to give us, within ourselves and our communities, the miraculous capacity to embrace our Creator himself.
When I hear the monks pray these lines, I’m reminded of the Benedictine motto inscribed in the Belmont Abbey College seal by the first letter of each Latin word: Ut In Omnibus, Glorificetur Deus, That in all things God may be glorified. In a way this, too, is a prayer of audacious hope, that everything we make and do – and everything we are – may invite God’s radiant presence more deeply into the world, participating in the impossible song of praise that transforms us beyond our comprehension.
As we approach Gaudete Sunday and the third week of Advent, together let’s rejoice in the Truth that exceeds human possibility: The King of Glory comes. Emmanuel, God with us.
