Psalm 44:11
weddings and funerals
Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline thy ear: and forget thy people and thy father's house. (Psalm 44:11 DR)
In every marriage their is also supposed to be a funeral. In the first marriage we read that Adam declares of his wife that she is “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh…” (Genesis 2:23 DR) Moses goes on to editorialize concerning this marriage:
Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh. (Genesis 2:24 DR)
St. Paul in his instructions concerning marriage notes that this sacrament does not exist for its own sake, but is rather a mystery which points beyond itself, a type of sorts for the union of Christ with his Church, and thus of the union of God with the soul. He invokes the primordial marriage to illustrate this point:
Because we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh. This is a great sacrament; but I speak in Christ and in the church. (Ephesians 5:30-32 DR)
The notion of leaving father and mother to be joined to one’s spouse obviously has a natural and human dimension to it; in marriage we transfer the primary duty we have to our families to now being devoted to the newly formed family. There is a relational shift that occurs, and while on the natural level we certainly need not love our original families less, nevertheless the priority necessarily changes as a husband is now bound by the duty of his new state to seek the good of his wife ad children above all others save for God. It is this hierarchical ordering of love and duty that makes the family into the most basic unit in human societies.
On the spiritual level the call to leave one’s “father and mother” is perhaps even more stark, as in baptism we are brought out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of light. Our old “father” is this world with all its allures and the sin which ensnares us, as St. John writes:
For all that is in the world, is the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life, which is not of the Father, but is of the world. (1 John 2:16 DR)
For us to continue to love the world thus becomes a sort of spiritual adultery, to return to the loves of the past or the old “family” which brought us forth into sin:
Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world. If any man love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him. (1 John 2:15 DR)
But as the soul is united to Christ in this spiritual nuptial union, so is it called to cast off the world and its works, to cleave to God in righteousness and holiness. St. Paul describes this transformation in his epistle to the Romans:
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing unto God, your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world; but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good, and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God. (Romans 12:1-2 DR)
It is important to note that this applies to sacramental marriage as well as to its fulfillment in the body of Christ united to him. Both call for making one’s life into a living sacrifice, as well as to cast off the former familial ties and embrace the new ones, to transform one’s life into the new state that has been embarked upon. This is the essence of love, in which it seeks the other’s good and willingly sets itself in second place so as to achieve that. St. Paul notes regarding this interplay of marriage and faith that husbands should
…love your wives, as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it: That he might sanctify it, cleansing it by the laver of water in the word of life: That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy, and without blemish. So also ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife, loveth himself. (Ephesians 5:25-28 DR)
This is a fascinating passage, especially as St. Paul closes out the thought by saying that to love one’s wife is to love oneself, the corollary being that if a husband does not love his wife in the manner described in this passage, then he cannot love himself, which of course accords with the words of St. John above.
The essence of both marriage and the spiritual life is thus to begin with a funeral, to leave the world and its allure behind, to abandon self-love to discover the charity which issues forth from God to supernaturally infuse the soul with His own charity. This cannot occur, however, until the death to self is complete, as this psalm verse alludes to:
By the world, is very properly understood the people who love the things of the world, which same world is the mansion of our old father Adam, who was driven into it from paradise. The word “forget” has much point in it, for it implies that we must cease to love the world so entirely and so completely, as if we had totally forgotten that we were ever in it, or that it had any existence. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 44, 10.)
In this manner the Blessed Virgin Mary is an exemplar of cleaving perfectly to her spiritual spouse, for having been conceived without original sin the love of the world was never in her and thus she was able to perfectly love without selfish ambition or vainglory or any of the other vices in which we are immersed. From her first moment of existence she had “forgotten” her people and father’s house, having been preserved from the kingdom of darkness.
In her Assumption she chose to unite herself so completely to the likeness of her Son that she willingly underwent death, the final emptying of herself in imitation of the emptying of her Son in the Incarnation. Thus, this daughter of the King truly answers the call of the Psalmist to “incline thy ear” as she did in her fiat at the Annunciation and finally to “forget thy people and thy father’s house” in the humility of her life and perfect conformity to her son. Her glorious Assumption thus becomes an archetype of sorts for the soul united to Christ, wherein we are brought from darkness into light, out of the world into the family of God:
Whencesoever the Gentiles came, they came from their father the devil; but they have renounced their sonship to the devil. “Forget also your own people, and your father's house.” He, in making you a sinner, begot you loathsome: the Other, in that “He justifies the ungodly,” [Romans 4:5] begets you again in beauty. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 44, 23)
In this animation I again wanted to focus on the Marian undertones that I think can be legitimately read in this verse. I searched through many images of the Assumption, but finally found the one used here which I thought exactly captured the feel I was going for, both in terms of the action of her eyes fixed on heaven and the exaltation of her posture while yet draped in humility.
I cut out the figure in Photoshop and brought it into After Effects. I rigged up the figure using the Puppet tool and then linked the pins to Nulls by means of PuppetTools 3, which has become an indispensable tool for animations like these. I have mentioned it before, but it basically links the pins via expressions to Nulls, which allows for more nuanced animation possibilities, and is often easier to control.
I wanted this to be pretty subtle so I just created some basic position transforms that lopped over the course of the composition. I then added the loopOut() expression to the animated properties to makes them seamlessly loop, and finally offset the animations of the various nulls to give the animation more of a floating and organic motion.
I composited some clouds into the scene, putting some in front of the figure and some behind to give it a bit of depth and then added a quick wiggle hold expression to the position property.
Enjoy.
Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline thy ear:
and forget thy people and thy father's house.
(Psalm 44:11 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: