How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place, O Lord Of Hosts!

By JAMES MONTI

Recently I had the privilege of attending a special sung Votive Mass of the Holy Angels in the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Chapel at the West Point Military Academy. Although it was obvious that the chapel had undergone some “postconciliar style” renovations, I found it deeply impressive, with a large traditional veiled and crowned tabernacle at the center of the sanctuary, flanked by two huge silver candlesticks, with a large silver sanctuary lamp suspended above.
The two candlesticks and the lamp seemed as if they had been made for a great Spanish cathedral. Four posts of a tall curtain screen behind the tabernacle were topped by carved figures of angels holding miniature candlesticks, which, I would imagine, are lit on special solemnities. To the left and to the right respectively were gilded wood statues of our Lady holding the Christ Child and St. Joseph. The face of our Lady is regal, an impression accentuated by the scepter in her hand.
Despite its relative simplicity, the sanctuary communicated in a compelling way the majesty of our Lord, a message of who God is that would particularly resonate with the men in uniform who have prayed in this military chapel for decades. But on this February evening it was not only the sense of sight that was so engaged.
The music for the Mass, sung by the Metropolitan Catholic Chorale, an all-volunteer New York area choir under the very able direction of Dr. Jennifer Donelson-Nowicka, was a mixture of plainchant Propers and settings of the Ordinary from the Missa Emendemus of Palestrina. Dr. Donelson-Nowicka describes truly sacred music as an arrow that points to Him who is “Wholly Other” (transcendent) and that makes us “want to go to Heaven.” It was certainly so at this Mass of the Holy Angels.
Later that evening, following a reception for those who had attended the Mass, as I passed through the chapel to depart, I was struck again by the air of majesty surrounding the tabernacle, standing out in the otherwise darkened church. A sign in the center aisle enjoins those entering to maintain a respectful silence.
Indeed, the silence of the night was voicing the same message that the sublime music of the Mass had earlier conveyed: “the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5). The thought that cadets could come here in the night to pray, alone with “the King of glory” (Psalm 24:7), brought to mind the medieval custom (beginning in the twelfth century) of knighthood candidates keeping an all-night vigil before the altar on the eve of their consecration to knighthood.
During the drive across the West Point campus on the way out, I could see even in the dark the outlines of the cluster of pre-World War I academic buildings known as Taylor Hall, Bartlett Hall, and Thayer Hall. The “collegiate Gothic” architecture of these halls possesses a nobility that symbolically expresses what service in the military is supposed to mean — a willingness even to lay down one’s life for his country.
It pointed metaphorically to the far greater purpose to which we as Catholics are all called by our Baptism — to love God so much that we would even be willing to die for our faith. This experience reminded me of what Dietrich von Hildebrand had to say about the value of beautiful architecture: “What spiritual nourishment a noble building offers to every passerby! Even when the passerby does not explicitly look at it, something of its poetry penetrates his life through the pores, so to speak” (Aesthetics: Volume II, Steubenville, OH, Hildebrand Project, 2018, p. 66).
For many centuries, the Church has presented the season of Lent to the faithful as a time of heightened spiritual warfare, beginning with the Collect for Ash Wednesday, wherein she prays that “as we take up battle against spiritual evils, we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint” (The Roman Missal, ©2010, ICEL).
The Gospel assigned to the First Sunday of Lent has always concerned the spiritual battle of Christ against Satan in the desert. And the Church has told us in no uncertain terms what the weapons for our Lenten battle are — prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. In regard to the first of these, prayer, we know we can and should pray everywhere and anywhere. But there are particular places where the soul breathes more easily, as it were, where the heart is more readily kindled, and where the mind is more quickly freed from the relentless noise and clutter of the world. Finding a beautiful church or chapel in which to pray can make a huge difference in our Lenten journey.
As we saw earlier, there is something especially powerful about a church or chapel that inspires breathless awe when you enter it. The human soul hungers to encounter the holiness, the mystery, the transcendence and majesty of God in the House of God. This was so in the Old Testament. Reading the highly detailed account of the construction and furnishing of the Temple of Solomon in the First Book of Kings, with gold, bronze, cedar, and olivewood copiously employed (1 Kings 6:1-37;7:13-51), it is little wonder that the Queen of Sheba found it all utterly breathtaking (1 Kings 10:5).
More awesome still is what transpired when upon the completion and dedication of the Temple God took possession of the sacred dwelling Solomon had built for Him: “And when the priests came out of the holy place, a cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord” (1 Kings 8:10-11).
As he prayed before the altar he had built, Solomon gave voice to the wonder and awe that man feels in the presence of God: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27).
Yet God does indeed dwell in the habitations we build for Him, even in the smallest country churches. And when the tabernacle and the sanctuary, no matter how small, are designed with beauty and reverence, and with faith in the Real Presence of Our Lord, those who come to pray and adore will more profoundly perceive the infinite majesty of Him who dwells there. So it is well worth the effort to seek out and find churches where such beauty will help us to lift up our hearts to God.
In his recently published deeply moving personal account of his conversion to the Catholic faith From Fire by Water (2019), Sohrab Ahmari, op-ed editor for the New York Post, tells of how the definitive moment of his decision to become a Catholic came when on Pentecost Sunday of 2016 he stopped into London’s Brompton Oratory and attended a Solemn High Latin Mass there.
Even before the Mass began, he found himself captivated by the sheer magnificence of the high altar and the tabernacle, the latter illuminated by a shaft of late morning sunlight. Reflecting upon the impression this sight made upon him, and how the “metalwork and masonry and painting” had directed his imagination to “spiritual realities,” he observes: “This was a holy place, set apart from the banality and corruption of human affairs….Here, beauty paid an enduring homage to the theological precepts that inspired and preceded it” (From Fire by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2019, p. 196).
Only in the next life will we come to learn just had many conversions, vocation decisions, and holy resolutions have been wrought coram Sanctissimo amid the quiet and stillness of a beautiful church. So we have everything to gain from making “mini-pilgrimages” to such a church during Lent. It would be really advantageous for families, whenever feasible, to put everyone in the car to say the family rosary in church.
The Church’s ancient rite of consecrating a new church makes it overwhelmingly clear what a unique and privileged place a Catholic church is. In the 1595-1596 Pontificale Romanum, this rite runs for almost a hundred pages. In these lavishly complex ceremonies for making the new church holy and “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2), the bishop, accompanied by the clergy and the faithful, goes in procession three times around the outside walls, continually sprinkling them with holy water; thrice he strikes upon the closed front door with his crozier, commanding admittance with the dialogue from Psalm 24:7-10 (“Lift up your heads, O gates!,” etc.).
After the third circuit, the front door is opened and the bishop enters. Among the many liturgical actions that follow, the floor is sprinkled with ashes to form a giant cross from one corner to the other, and the bishop with the tip of his crozier inscribes in these ashes the letters of the Greek and Latin alphabets. The front door, the altar and the walls are anointed with Chrism, and the altar is repeatedly incensed. The ultimate purpose of these beautiful and mysterious rites is summed up in a Collect recited by the bishop before the relics for the altar are carried into the church:
“Thy house, we beseech thee, O Lord, mercifully enter, and build an everlasting dwelling to thee in the hearts of thy faithful; and grant that this house, which stands solemn by thy dedication, may be made sublime by thy habitation. Through Christ our Lord” (text in Manlio Sodi and Achille Triacca, editors, Pontificale Romanum: Editio Princeps [1595-1596], facsimile edition, MLCT 1 Vatican City: © Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), p. 355 (original pagination).

How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place

In the Book of Hours that St. Thomas More had with him for most of the fourteen months of his imprisonment prior to his martyrdom, he wrote beside the opening words of Psalm 84 the annotation, “The prayer either of a man who is shut up in prison, or of one who lies sick in bed, yearning [to go] to church” (text in Thomas More’s Prayer Book: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Annotated Pages, translated and edited by Louis Martz and Richard Sylvester, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1969, p. 200).
Psalm 84 begins, “How lovely is thy dwelling place, / O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, yea, faints / for the courts of the Lord” (Psalm 84:1-2). We have all experienced in one way or another this loveliness of the Lord’s dwelling place that More as a prisoner could only long for.
We who are still free enough and well enough to frequent the House of God need to do so as often as we can — surely a great way to observe Lent.