Till I Find a Place for the Lord

Meditation on Psalm 132 Grail Translation

For as long as I have worn the priestly stole, the words of this psalm have burned quietly within me: “I will not enter the house where I live, nor go to the bed where I rest. I will give no sleep to my eyes, no slumber to my eyelids, till I find a place for the Lord, a dwelling for the Strong One of Jacob.” They have always been my compass, an unyielding call to seek a dwelling for God that is not built by hands. Through the years, in the chapel, the confessional, the nido, these words have whispered: do not rest until He finds rest in you.

As a priest, they once urged me outward: to labor, to serve, to sanctify the things of this world by His presence. But as the years have drawn me into solitude, the psalm’s meaning has ripened, deepened, and burned with another kind of fire. The “place for the Lord” is no longer something to be sought in the building of churches, communities, or ministries, but in the uncluttered stillness of the heart. The vow now is inward: to let the soul itself become His dwelling, to let nothing distract, nothing comfort, nothing remain that is not His.

This hidden labor has been the hardest. It is easy to build; it is agony to be hollowed out. Yet this is the task of these later years: to become the temple of silence, the hermitage of the heart, where the Lord may find His rest. The Desert Fathers lived this psalm not by reciting it, but by breathing it. Abba Arsenius prayed each day, “Lord, lead me into the way of salvation, and teach me to be still.” For them, stillness was not passivity but vigilance, a refusal to allow the mind to wander from the remembrance of God. They longed to give no “slumber to their eyelids” until the heart itself became a living altar.

And now, as I wait and watch, perhaps indefinitely, before crossing the threshold of Holy Transfiguration Monastery, this psalm has taken root in me in a new way. The waiting itself has become part of its vow. If the Lord grants me to dwell there one day, I wish to bring nothing with me but what has been purified in this silence: a heart emptied of self, of identity, of all that once seemed precious, save for the virtues He has planted: faith, humility, obedience, and love.

Elder Aimilianos wrote that when the soul is stripped of every comfort and stands naked before God, only then can it be clothed with light. That is the kind of offering I seek to make: not the zeal of youth or the works of a busy priesthood, but a heart purified by waiting, free of every other claim.

So I say again with David, but now with quieter urgency: I will not rest until I find a place for the Lord. Not a cell of stone, nor a community of men, but a heart that is His monastery: a dwelling where He alone abides, and where all that is not Him has fallen away into silence.