Psalm 107:9
falling seeds
Galaad is mine, and Manasses is mine and Ephraim the protection of my head. Juda is my king: (Psalm 107:9 DR)
Over the past couple years I have become more acquainted with the Divine Office and thus with the Martyrology that is read every day at Prime. An unmistakable characteristic of many of the accounts of the early martyrs (generally those before the conversion of Constantine) is how many of their acts of martyrdom brought about the conversion of bystanders, and sometimes even their own executioners.
One example is St. Romanus on August 9th, a soldier acquainted with St. Lawrence:
…who, moved by the confession of blessed Laurence, begged to be baptized by him, and was forthwith taken and scourged, and finally beheaded. (Roman Martyrology, Aug 9)
Another is St. Corona on May 14:
When Corona, the wife of a soldier, began to declare him [St. Victor] blessed for his constancy in martyrdom, she saw two crowns descend from heaven, one sent for Victor, and one for herself. When she testified this in the hearing of all, she was torn apart between two trees, while Victor was beheaded. (ibid., May 14)
In these examples the saying of Jesus in John 12 is fulfilled. Originally spoken of himself, it also applies to his body the Church:
Amen, amen I say to you, unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, Itself remaineth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (John 12:24-25 DR)
St. Augustine sees in this verse a prefiguring of this concept. Commenting on the parallel verse in Psalm 59, he takes the word Ephraim in its etymology sense to draw out the mystical meaning:
Ephraim is interpreted fruitfulness. Mine, he says, is fruitfulness, and this fruitfulness is the strength of My Head. For My Head is Christ. And whence is fruitfulness the strength of Him? Because unless a grain were to fall into the earth, it would not be multiplied, alone it would remain. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 59, 9)
The strength of the Church thus obtains through its constant witness to the truth and to Christ; as Tertullian would famously quip—the blood of martyrs is seed. It is through the Church following its Head in this witness—even unto death— that the faith grows and perpetuates.
In the early martyrs there did not appear to be much outward strength, and many are nameless and have to be commemorated anonymously. At the time it probably did not appear that there was much strength to the Church, especially when suffering various bouts of persecution. But as some of the early martyrs whose witness inspired and converted those who observed, that strength was hidden, to be planted in the soul of souls and watered by the blood and confession of the martyrs and confessors. St. Augustine concludes:
Fall then to earth did Christ in His Passion, and there followed fruit-bearing in the Resurrection. He was hanging and was being despised: the grain was within, it had powers to draw after it all things. How in a grain do numbers of seeds lie hidden, something abject it appears to the eyes, but a power turning into itself matter and bringing forth fruit is hidden; so in Christ's Cross virtue was hidden, there appeared weakness... Hear the strength of Him: that which is a weak thing of God, is stronger than men. With reason so great fruitfulness has followed: it is mine, says the Church. (ibid.)
This was an earlier animation that I created, and so I wasn’t necessarily thinking along the lines of what was mentioned above. In the Douay-Rheims the term that St. Augustine uses as strength is rendered protection, and thus I was moving more along those lines.
I found this nice image of an angel statue, which I thought had an interesting pose in that it is (at least isolated from the background) kind of indistinct. It could be in the pose of protecting (like a guardian angel) with his head bowed down, perhaps in intercession. At any rate, I thought it would work well.
I isolated the angel in Photoshop and then brought it into After Effects, placing the angel figure into a precomp. I did this because the effect I wanted to use is based on the pixel size of the layer, and I wanted to be able to control those bounds.
In the precomp I left enough padding on the sides to be able to create what amounts to tiles of the angel in the main composition. I then applied Motion Tile to the precomp and adjusted the parameters as needed and finally animated the position to achieve the seamless loop. It’s a pretty simple technique once get everything set up on the front end.
Enjoy.
Galaad is mine, and Manasses is mine and Ephraim the protection of my head.
Juda is my king: (Psalm 107:9 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: