Psalm 11:3
seeds of deceit
They have spoken vain things every one to his neighbour: with deceitful lips, and with a double heart have they spoken. (Psalm 11:3 DR)
I think that every kid has at one time or another had fun with blowing the seeds of a dandelion. I remember when I was much younger grabbing handfuls and blowing on them to see their seeds get caught in the wind drafts and float away.
As as kid it is fun, but once you are an adult with a yard attached to your house, it gets quite a bit less cute, as every wafting seed is a potential future weed.
To be fair, their is something kind of majestic about watching dandelion seeds float in the air, even a certain beauty. And the weed itself isn’t exactly the ugliest thing in the world; were it just another flower it would be fine. The most troublesome and annoying aspect of dandelions is that they tend to take over everything and choke out the plants that you actually want to grow. There is naturally in this fallen world an inverse proportion between the effort needed to cultivate something beautiful and the ease with which weeds propagate. In terms of dandelions all you need is a slight breeze or a curious kid.
The Psalmist doesn’t liken lies and deceit to weeds, but he may as well, for here he describes the way in which our race is conversant with lies and the ease with which they spread. The Roman poet Virgil rightly quipped:
Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius ullum.
Rumour, than whom no other evil thing is faster.
In this world we deal with deception and falsehood all the time, and we are all inborn with the tendency to what the Psalmist calls a double-heart; that is, we say one thing yet intend to do another.
For the Psalmist the danger lies precisely in this double-heartedness, for if this is the lot of mankind, then who can one trust, or to whom can one turn? In the previous verse he noted that there is now no saint, and thus he recognizes that his recourse must be to God alone.
The vain things that are spoken are an inversion of truth, for men seek by flattery and double-heartedness to attain their own desires at the expense of each other. Such a situation is not conducive to righteousness, except in terms of contrast, for the more lies abound, the greater the clarity of truth tends to become. This is why the Psalmist rests his hopes in the truth of God alone, for among men it is difficult if not impossible to find.
Truth thus becomes a lodestone of sorts for the spiritual life, for to attain communion with God the truth must be embraced in its stark totality while all lies and deceit are put away. For fallen creatures the truth can be painful, as it lays bare pretensions and exposes weakness and the dark corners of our hearts, but that purifying light can also allow us to ascend into the contemplation of the divine, no longer clouded by the dim fog of sin.
The life of virtue requires a complete embrace of truth, which is why the sacrament of Penance is so important, in that we are afforded the opportunity to be truthful about ourselves, to lay open our faults and failings and sin and receive the grace to overcome this bent towards what is false. The absolution not only washes away sin but opens up channels of grace that are otherwise obscured in the darkness and falsity of sin. As St. John says:
If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he also is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all iniquity. (1 John 1:6-9 DR)
This animation was easy enough in its principle, but took some time to set up. The hardest part was finding a good image of dandelion seeds that would be relatively easy to isolate. This took some time, but I eventually found one that worked sufficiently.
In After Effects I set up the base image in the main comp and brought in the seed. I then precomped this and disabled it. Next I added a Solid and applied Trapcode Particular to it. In the settings I chose to have the Particle Emitter to be the precomp of the seed. I could have put multiple seeds in there for more variety, but I left it as just one and then adjusted the emitter and particle settings to randomize size and rotation.
Finally I applied some environment effects such as wind to get the particles to move and then just set up a standard loop for it. I also added in a quick lens flare just for fun.
Enjoy.
They have spoken vain things every one to his neighbour: with deceitful lips, and with a double heart have they spoken.
(Psalm 11:3 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: