Psalm 27 carries a Davidic superscription and reads like the prayer of a man with enemies at the door. The first half is a confession of confidence; the second half is a cry that sounds almost desperate. Verse 4 sits in the middle like a hinge. David is not a monk; he is a king with a war on, and yet what he names as his single request is not victory but proximity. The Psalter was Israel's hymnbook in temple and synagogue, and this verse trained generations of worshipers to want one thing more than safety.

From the writers we read together

Brennan Manning

former Franciscan priest and author of The Ragamuffin Gospel (1934-2013)

Manning spent his life arguing that most Christians have never let themselves be looked at by God. We are willing to work for him, talk about him, even suffer for him — but to sit still and let him gaze on us, and to gaze back, feels indulgent or unsafe. David's one request is exactly that indulgence. He wants to dwell, which is a slow verb, and to gaze, which is a defenseless one. Manning would say that the whole gospel is contained in whether you can let that happen for ten minutes a day.

The honest difficulty is that most of our prayer lists are longer than David's. We bring God a docket; he asked for one thing. That does not mean our requests are wrong — the same psalm ends with David pleading for rescue. It means there is a center, and the center is not getting what we need from God but being where God is. Manning's gift to the church was the permission to believe that the Father actually likes being looked at by his ragamuffin children, and that beholding him is, in the end, what we were made for.