Psalm 122:2

Behold as the eyes of the servants are on the hands of their masters, As the eyes of the handmaid are on the hands of her mistress: so are our eyes unto the Lord our God, until he have mercy on us. (Psalm 122:2 DR)

I have a dog who always wants to be on my lap, but also is very territorial and will bark at almost anything that he perceives to encroach upon the territory of our house. Which, to be fair, can be very annoying. His nature is to bark at these things, and even though I have attempted to train him to not do so—unsuccessfully, I might add—he simply cannot help himself. As such, once he hears a noise, his ears dart up, the hair on his back stands up and he shoots out of the room to jump up on a couch so he can look out the window and bark and protect, usually against my ineffective protestations.

When I eventually make my way downstairs to get him off the couch, I often have to use a sterner voice to get his attention, which then causes him to crouch down on the couch and look up at me with the most pathetic looking eyes. He “knows” he is in trouble and that he cannot overcome me if I chose to harm him, but he still looks to me and invariably averts my ire. And then—of course—15 seconds later he is back on my lap as if nothing happened.

The Psalmist invokes a similar dynamic in this verse, although between servants and masters, between handmaids and mistresses. There is a bit of an ambiguity here, for the eyes of both are on the hands of their lords, which could be for watching for what their lords desire, as in a gesture to perform some action, or watching the hand that is ready to strike, hoping for mercy from the scourging. This latter reading is how St. Robert Bellarmine takes it:

He tells us why he raised his eyes to God. It was to look upon God scourging him; in the hope that his wretched appearance may move God to mercy, and cause him to desist from scourging him. He illustrates it by the example of the servants, who, when flogged by their masters, look with a sorrowful countenance on the hand that flogs them, hoping by their looks to move their masters to pity. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 122, 2.)

These scourgings, he goes on to write, are the sufferings we experience during the pilgrimage of this life, both the outward persecutions from the world but also the inward temptations and vexations that are an inevitable part of this pilgrimage. It is precisely because they will always accompany this journey that we must perpetually look to the Lord for mercy:

[T]he Psalm does not fix stated times for us to raise our eyes to God, but says it must be done incessantly, “until he have mercy on us,” which will not be accomplished until we shall have arrived at our country; for then “God will crown us with mercy and compassion, when he shall have healed all our diseases, and satisfied our desires with good things…” (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 122, 2.)

St. Bellarmine takes an eschatological approach to the fulfillment of this passage, whereas St. Jerome sees here a common manner of reading the word “until,” noting that it can mean something which speaks about the perpetuity of the action itself rather than a temporal cessation:

David also in the fourth Song of Ascents speaks thus, “Behold, as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maiden unto the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look unto the Lord our God, until he have mercy upon us.” Will the prophet, then, look unto the Lord until he obtain mercy, and when mercy is obtained will he turn his eyes down to the ground? (St. Jerome, The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary, 6.)

His point in this is to refute Helvidius who denied the perpetual virginity of Mary, here based on the passage in the Gospel which says that St. Joseph did not know her until Jesus was born (cf. Matthew 1:25). St. Jerome uses Helvdius’s own logic against him to demonstrate that St. Joseph chose to never exercise his prerogative as husband:

In short, what I want to know is why Joseph refrained until the day of her delivery? Helvidius will of course reply, because he heard the angel say, “that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost…” And could the just man dare, he says, to think of approaching her, when he heard that the Son of God was in her womb? Excellent! We are to believe then that the same man who gave so much credit to a dream that he did not dare to touch his wife, yet afterwards… though well acquainted with such surprising wonders, dared to touch the temple of God, the abode of the Holy Ghost, the mother of his Lord? (St. Jerome, The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary, 6.)

The Blessed Virgin thus exemplifies the perpetual nature of having one’s eyes upon the Lord, for in her perfect humility she was completely submitted to the will of God and in her fiat to the angel’s words conceived our Lord by the Holy Ghost. This “yes” to God did not end with the birth of our Lord but began from the the moment of her Immaculate Conception and continued all the way to the foot of the Cross. She never ceased to have her eyes turned towards the hand of her master, and although she was never scourged for any sin as she never committed any, yet that prophesied sword (cf. Luke 2:35) still pierced her soul as she suffered the Seven Sorrows which accompanied her complete devotion of her life to God.

This is why St. Jerome and the Church understand the Perpetual Virginity of Mary as essential to understanding her “yes” to God, for that perpetual integrity of her body is the outward expression of the perpetual integrity of her soul. The “heaven” that St. Augustine predicated of the righteous soul in the previous passage was fully manifest in her, and her life was characterized by this complete abandonment to God’s will. Her eyes were always upon the hand of the Lord, and she thus had perfect confidence that His eyes were upon her, and her Magnificat draws on many themes found in this passage:

My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. Because he that is mighty, hath done great things to me; and holy is his name. And his mercy is from generation unto generations, to them that fear him. (Luke 1:46-50 DR)

The humility of her soul has her eyes lifted up to God, and God looks upon this humility and exalts her to perpetual blessedness. The mercy of God is likewise perpetual, given to her in preserving her from the stain of Original Sin and at work in the grace with which she was filled through the entirety of her life.

However, her “yes” to God went even beyond the cross, all the way to the acceptance of a death she was not due so as to be perfectly conformed to her Son, as well as in the blessedness of the Beatific Vision following her Assumption in which that “yes” resounds throughout all eternity.

In a similar manner we in this pilgrimage of life perpetually look to the Lord for mercy, for from Him is the charity which unites us to Him in His mystical Body, the Church, the Bride of Christ. St. Augustine draws out a fascinating insight here, for the handmaiden the Psalmist speaks of is a type of the Church, who is espoused to Christ and longs for the wedding:

When therefore you hear Christ, lift up your eyes to the hands of your Master; when you hear the Power of God and the Wisdom of God, lift up your eyes to the hands of your Mistress; for you are both servant and handmaiden; servant, for you are a people; handmaiden, for you are the Church. But this maiden has found great dignity with God; she has been made a wife. But until she come unto those spiritual embraces, where she may without apprehension enjoy Him whom she has loved, and for whom she has sighed in this tedious pilgrimage, she is betrothed: and has received a mighty pledge, the blood of the Spouse for whom she sighs without fear…

But as there is no one else who can be preferred to Christ, let her love without apprehension: and before she is joined unto Him, let her love, and sigh from a distance and from her far pilgrimage... (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 122, 4.)

The longing of the maiden for her espoused is not ended upon the day of the wedding, but is in fact intensified and perpetuated in a more sublime manner, for now she knows the one for whom she longed, which in itself deepens and perfects that desire. This is precisely how the Psalmist intends the word “until” to be understood, not as a transactional moment in which God finally has mercy and we go back to whatever normal life we might have in mind, but rather a complete surrender of the will to God’s will, a perfect conformity of heart and soul and mind to that of Christ, who also in His Passion and Death submitted to the will of the Father for our salvation. This intercession of our Lod on our behalf was also not simply a single moment in time, but rather was, as it were, expanded into eternity, for in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass that self-same sacrifice is re-presented and offered by our Lord the High Priest through his ministers in persona Christi, as our Lord perpetually makes intercession for us:

But this, for that he continueth for ever, hath an everlasting priesthood, whereby he is able also to save for ever them that come to God by him; always living to make intercession for us. For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made higher than the heavens; Who needeth not daily (as the other priests) to offer sacrifices first for his own sins, and then for the people’s: for this he did once, in offering himself. (Hebrews 7:24-27 DR)

As we look to the Lord for mercy, we hope to obtain from Him the grace to imitate our Lord and the Blessed Virgin Mary, who both were perfectly united to the will of the Father. Our first parents Adam and Eve tried to hide themselves from God’s eyes in their sin, but the New Adam and New Eve had their eyes turned towards Him. The soul that longs for mercy requires it perpetually and thus is always looking to the Lord who provides it, and whose promise will never fail:

“Behold the eyes of the Lord are on them that fear him.” Elsewhere, it says, “The eyes of the Lord are upon the just,” but here, “on those that fear him.” When we look upon the Lord and our eyes are on Him, so that we say, “Behold as the eyes of the servants are on the hands of their masters, so are our eyes unto the Lord our God,” then, we, as it were, draw the eye of the Lord to watch over us. (St. Basil the Great, Homilies on the Psalms, 15.10.)

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I found this excellent image of the Blessed Virgin Mary and isolated it in Photoshop and brought it into After Effects. I added in a background texture and applied Wave Watp to it and set the displacement to Square to get the panel movements. I also applied CC Ball Action to another texture and modified the blending mode and animated the displacement for a subtle animation in the background.

Enjoy.

View a higher quality version of this gif here: