Yea, the sparrow has found a house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even your altars, O LORD of hosts, my King, and my God.
Read Chapter 84
Augustine of Hippo
AD 430
7. Thou hast heard a groan in the winepress, "My soul longeth and faileth for the courts of the Lord:" hear how it holdeth out, rejoicing in hope: "My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God." Here they have rejoiced for that cause. Whence cometh rejoicing, but of hope? Wherefore have they rejoiced? "In the living God." What has rejoiced in thee? "My heart and my flesh." Why have they rejoiced? "For," saith he, "the sparrow hath found her a house, and the turtle-dove a nest, where she may lay her young" (ver. 3). What is this? He had named two things, and he adds two figures of birds which answer to them: he had said that his heart rejoiced and his flesh, and to these two he made the sparrow and turtle-dove to correspond: the heart as the sparrow, the flesh as the dove. The sparrow hath found herself a home: my heart hath found itself a home. She tries her wings in the virtues of this life, in faith, and hope, and charity, by which she may fly unto her home: and when she sha...
Turtle. Moderns prefer to render "swallows "without reason. (Bo chart)
Thy altars. They can rest in the ruins of the temple; (Kimchi; Muis) but in that supposition, the altars were destroyed. (Haydock)
It seems rather that this is an exclamation, (Berthier) which the enraptured psalmist is unable to conclude, giving us to understand that he desired his asylum and place of rest to be near God's altars, (Haydock) with the angels above, Isaias vi. (Worthington)
The faithful soul seeks to dwell in heaven, and in the mean time keeps in the Catholic Church, laying up store of good works. For, out of it, whatever good pagans and heretics may seem to do, by feeding the hungry, as these things are not laid in the nest, they will be trodden under foot, conculcabuntur. (St. Augustine) (Worthington)
