Psalm 107:8
burdens
God hath spoken in his holiness. I will rejoice, and I will divide Sichem and I will mete out the vale of tabernacles. (Psalm 107:8 DR)
It is seemingly paradoxical that we often have to take burdens upon ourselves to enable us to move better.
I have a older drone that is still a marvel of engineering—it is very light and small but can take excellent video and is very maneuverable. More recent drones are even more impressive.
However, all these things come at a cost. To make it light, it must have a relatively small battery, which means it is quite limited in its flight time and therefore its range. This lack of weight also limits its potential altitude as well as the conditions under which it can fly, as a blustery day can bring diminished performance, if not make it entirely inoperable.
In a similar way our spiritual lives are limited in their flight, so to speak, if they are too light. By this I mean the lack of discipline, fasting, prayer, etc. These are practices and habits we have to take on to allow our souls to ascend in the spiritual life; without them we are forever grounded.
In this way we are unlike my drone; if I add weight to it it will perhaps be slightly more stable in the wind (assuming I can balance it perfectly), but its battery will drain even faster and it will stop performing to its specifications. That’s because it’s not meant to go beyond those operating specs. Our souls, however, are designed to take upon them this extra “weight,” these extra burdens. Without them we are “carried about with every wind of doctrine (Ephesians 4:14 DR).
St. Augustine sees in this dynamic at work in this verse. The dividing of Sichem he takes to refer mystically to the shoulders, given the etymology of the name. The division here hen becomes between belief and unbelief, sin and repentance:
I divide, is what? Some will believe, others will not believe....The shoulders are divided, in order that their sins may burden some men, while others may take up the burden of Christ. For godly shoulders He was requiring when He said, For My yoke is gentle, and My burden is light. (Matthew 11:30) (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 59, 8.)
This burden that Christ provides is not one that will weigh us down, but that rather gives us wings, which he expounds in this remarkable passage:
Another burden oppresses and loads you, but Christ's burden relieves you: another burden has weight, Christ's burden has wings. For even if you pull off the wings from a bird, you remove a kind of weight; and the more weight you have taken away, the more on earth it will abide. She that you have chosen to disburden lies there: she flies not, because you have taken off a weight: let there be given back the weight, and she flies. Such is Christ's burden; let men carry it, and not be idle: let them not be heeded that will not bear it; let them bear it that will, and they shall find how light it is, how sweet, how pleasant, how ravishing unto Heaven, and from earth how transporting. (ibid.)
It can be tempting to think that the spiritual practices and habits that we are exhorted to undertake are somehow burdensome, but they actually are what frees us from the weight and the gravitational force of sin and this world. Christ’s burden is thus light because it allows us to cast those chains aside, to become what we were created to be.
In this .gif I wanted to focus mostly on the opening line, mostly because I already had an idea in mind of the look and style. I am struck by the phrase that God hath spoken in his holiness. We hear speech all the time, but God’s word comes in holiness; it is not mixed (like that we hear all day) with sin or even the mundane—it is pure and thus full of clarity.
Thinking of this I thought it’s be interesting to use Scrabble tiles to form the word holiness. I’ve done videos in my professional work using Scrabble tiles before, so I pretty much knew exactly what I wanted to do. I had contemplated shooting a stop motion version of this with real tiles, but then I got lazy and wanted to see if I could do it all in After Effects.
I found a digital pack of Scrabble tiles that I purchased and separated out the letters. I positioned all the letters of holiness where I wanted them and then positioned other random letters around.
To animate them, I added a wiggle hold expression to the Position and Rotation of each letter, and linked the Frequency and Amount of the wiggle parameter, notated as wiggle(0,0), respectively. And since each instance of the wiggle expression generates a new seed, it will have the effect of (seemingly) randomly assigning the values. I linked all these expressions up to a master control Null with two Expression Sliders on it to control Frequency and Amount. I then set the Frequency for Position to something like 4 (i.e., change value 4 times a second) and Amount to something like 1500 (i.e., +/- 1500 pixels). I did something similar for Rotation.
The result is that the layers will wiggle 4 times every second +/- 1500 pixels, each with a different seed, which gives the scattered motion. I then simply animated the Amount slider from 1500 to 0 over a certain amount of time, which has the effect of returning each layer to its original position.
I like how it goes from being nonsense scatted letters to coming together to form the term holiness, which I think illustrates the concept well.
Enjoy.
God hath spoken in his holiness.
I will rejoice, and I will divide Sichem and I will mete out the vale of tabernacles.
(Psalm 107:8 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: