The blues struck this week. A sense of longing. You might even say a kind of fainting.

Psalm 84 leaped up for attention, quite by accident. It’s a psalm of enormous contrasts, almost bi-polar in its highs and lows.  Joy and longing sit right beside each other like first-born and second-born twins. No sooner is Praise born (“How lovely is Thy dwelling place!”) than faith’s twin, Longing, is born – the longing, the sense of estrangement that yearns to be united with the lovely dwelling place: “My soul longs, yea, faints for the courts of the LORD….”  It is this Psalm that inspired Johannes Brahms’ Requiem, sung here by a combined choir in a lovely place in Atlanta, Georgia. Bring the blues to the music of the Psalm and see what happens.