Psalm 139:7-8, 9-10, 11-12ab

R. You have searched me and you know me, Lord.

Where can I go from your spirit?
From your presence where can I flee?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I sink to the nether world, you are present there.

If I take the wings of the dawn,
if I settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
Even there your hand shall guide me,
and your right hand hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall hide me,
and night shall be my light”–
For you darkness itself is not dark,

and night shines as the day.

R. You have searched me and you know me, Lord.

Some of you, if you remained conscious during one of my homilies[1], may remember me droning on
about the Responsorial Psalm in Mass, how I often think of it as the ‘middle child’ of the Liturgy of the Word.
Something rich in what it has to say to us, but often over-looked as it sits between the First Reading and the Gospel.
Well, isn’t today’s Responsorial Psalm a cracker!!

We are invited to contemplate God’s intimate knowing of us. For the Middle Eastern mind of the psalmist,
the heights of the heavens, the depths of the nether world, the place of the sun’s rising and its setting,
and the ends of the sea (wherever that was!), would have encompassed not just the entirety of the geography of the earth,
but the very limits of the cosmos. And, no matter where it is that I might seek to place myself in that terrain,
God is already there holding me, and seeking to guide. Lauren Daigle phrases this very nicely in her performance of Trust in You as she sings: “There’s not a place that I will go you’ve not already stood”.[2]

In these difficult times let us ask The One for whom the darkness is not dark to bring a certain quite and sureness to our hearts and minds.