Psalm 136:6
memories
Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee: If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy. (Psalm 136:6 DR)
It may seem paradoxical, but in the spiritual life the greatest temptation we often face comes not in the storms of adversity or tribulation, but rather when in the midst of comfort and prosperity. This paradox is only apparent, however, because we are all too accustomed to imagine that there is some correlation between God’s favor and material blessing; this is the trap that Job’s friends fell into, for they could not imagine that Job could suffer while yet being a righteous man.
Our Lord himself demolishes this paradigm in the Beatitudes, especially as they conclude:
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake: Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets that were before you. (Matthew 5:10-12 DR)
The reason that comfort can be so dangerous to the spiritual life and a hindrance to spiritual progress is not because material comforts and blessings are evil per se or not at some times blessing from God. Rather, it is because in our concupiscence we are prone to make these things the source of our joy and hope, to take our eyes off of God. This is especially the case when we think we have such things because of God’s favor, which can lead to presumption, as if we are owed these things as a reward for our righteousness. The blessings and comforts of this world can make us deaf to God’s voice as their cacophony rings louder in our ears the nearer we draw to them in affection.
The Psalmist in this verse recognizes the danger inherent in exile. For while a terrible calamity has befallen his people, the temptations and allures of Babylon are many, such that the exiles may begin to get comfortable in Babylon and forget God amidst material prosperity, even in exile. The things of this world can effect in us a sort of Stockholm Syndrome where we not only make peace with our captors, but even begin to sympathize with them. In the spiritual life this occurs when the lusts of the flesh work their way into our hearts and we begin to make them the beginning of our joy.
This is why our Lord in the Beatitudes emphasizes things like meekness, being poor in spirit, merciful, pure of heart, mourning. We cannot exist in relation to this world of our exile in some sort of neutral state. Either we make the heavenly Jerusalem the beginning of our joy or Babylon will inevitably become that. Virtue does not exist merely in avoiding the evil but in actively seeking after the good.
One may recall the prophet Daniel, another of those in exile, who every day intentionally made Jerusalem the beginning of his joy:
Now when Daniel knew this, that is to say, that the law was made, he went into his house: and opening the windows in his upper chamber towards Jerusalem, he knelt down three times a day, and adored, and gave thanks before his God, as he had been accustomed to do before. (Daniel 6:10 DR)
It is important to note that only a few verse prior we are told that Daniel had been favored by the king and made one of the three top officials in the kingdom. He had all that one could desire in this world—wealth, power, fame, respect—yet every day he still turned his face towards Jerusalem three times a day to pray. And when he found out about this law that he surely knew was equivalent to a bill of attainder—that is, a law passed specifically to prosecute him—he nevertheless persisted in his devotion to God.
There could no doubt have been innumerable justifications he could have made to himself to stop praying for a few days; after all, think of all the good he could do for his people in the position he was in, and how hard it might go for them if he was not there.
Yet since he had cultivated virtue and made Jerusalem the beginning of his joy, he was ready to die rather than break faith even for a day. The allures of Babylon could not tempt him away from what he knew was right.
In this world and life we will be assaulted by the “concupiscence of the eyes and the flesh and the pride of life”(1 John 2:16), but we must bear in mind that these things are not from the Father, but from the world. The comforts of this life, though not wrong per se, can lure us into thinking Babylon is our home and forget Jerusalem. Those who strive for virtue will, as the Psalmist says and as Daniel exemplified, make Jerusalem the beginning of my joy:
Such, in fact, is the peculiarity and the distinguishing mark of the elect, if they neither in prosperity nor adversity lose sight of their future country, and would hesitate in losing hand or tongue, should God’s glory, and their own eternal salvation require it, and if they take no real pleasure in anything but in longing and hoping for that celestial home that is not made by the hand of man, where is to be found that joy of which the Lord speaks in the Gospel, when he says, “Enter into the joy of thy Lord.” (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 136, 5-6.)
For this animation I was thinking about the act of remembering, and while memory is not reducible to a function of the brain, I was thinking of synapses and such as a representative image for it.
The level of abstraction then moved up a level since I didn’t really want to draw that, but rather utilized the great plugin called Plexus which creates these amazing connected structures in After Effects.
I started with a base shape, probably a Cube Primitive. I then added some Renderers to it for the Points, Lines and Triangulation. Plexus is flexible in that you can map the rendering over distance or by means of other properties, as well as map colors and opacity and such to those rendered objects. In this case I kept it pretty colorful for fun.
Next I added in a Noise Effector which allows you to map the distribution of the rendered objects based on a Fractal Noise pattern, although you can also use other Effectors to do this. I adjusted the X, Y and Z planes individually to get some nice randomness and then simply animated the Noise offset. Fortunately their is a built-in loop builder which makes that aspect of it easier; in the original version of this plug-in (which was still great) I had to do a lot of work to create pseudo-loop points. But now you just click a checkbox and set the time. It’s a great way for me to be lazy productive.
Enjoy.
Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee:
If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy.
(Psalm 136:6 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: