During his general audience held in the courtyard of his summer residence south of Rome on Aug. 28, Pope John Paul II resumed his series of teachings on the psalms and canticles of the Liturgy of the Hours. He offered his reflections on Psalm 84, which he called “a very charming psalm that is permeated with a mystical longing for the God of life.”

The background for the psalm is a pilgrimage of the faithful to the temple in Jerusalem, the Holy Father said, which was an object of fascination for the Jewish people: “The pilgrim expresses his great happiness of spending some time in the courts of the house of his God and contrasts this spiritual happiness with the delusion of idols that drives people to the ‘tents of the wicked,’ namely those infamous temples of injustice and perversion.”

The Pope noted that the early Church Fathers, especially St. John Climacus, considered this pilgrimage to Zion as “a symbol of the just man's continuous progress toward the ‘eternal dwelling,’ where God welcomes his friends full of joy.” He urged pilgrims at the audience to keep their “eyes fixed on the shining goal of peace and communion” with God and ended his talk with a quote from the psalm: “O Lord of hosts, happy are those who trust in you!”