Psalm 62:6

time for some fat injections

Let my soul be filled as with marrow and fatness: and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips. (Psalm 62:6 DR)

In the Kansas City area where I live there are myriad options for barbeque, and most of them are pretty good. It is—to be fair—somewhat of an embarrassment of riches, as the competition within the greater KC area generally entails that any place you go will more than likely have above average barbeque, at which point one gets into greater minutiae such as which place has the best ribs, best burnt ends, etc. Although—again to be fair—once you’ve experienced really good barbeque, such questions are no longer incidental.

The greatest difficulty with having so many great options is that once you leave the area you have to come to grips that you are just not going to find good barbeque anywhere else except in very specific locations. I’m sure the same is true of any other cuisine for which a certain area has a claim to fame.

There is something in our nature wherein once we have tasted of something truly good, we have have difficulty with lesser versions of that and will either sacrifice to get that good thing or will suffer disappointment when we cannot obtain it. The third option is complete disillusionment and rejection of the good thing altogether.

The Psalmist now turns to the state of his own soul before the Lord. The Psalm began with his cry from the midst of the desert, a place of barrenness and thirst, but also of hunger. The desert emaciates its inhabitant, but the Psalmist—who has found in the desert a sanctuary, as it were—desires that in the same manner his downcast and emaciated soul will be filled and strengthened.

The words of filling by means of “marrow and fatness” are probably odd to our very recent contemporary context, in which “fat” in terms of food has been nearly universally castigated, probably unjustly. We have been trained by the modern food industry to avoid fat, to eat fat-free foods, etc. And while I won’t attempt to adjudicate any of that here, I will only observe that such a perspective is not only peculiar in human history, but also even in the contemporary world, it being a largely modern western mindset. It is thus easy to miss what the Psalmist is saying because of our own preconceptions.

“Fatness” (pingeudine) can have several meanings as an adjective in Latin such as fatness, richness, abundance, fullness (cf. Charlton T. Lewis, Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary). The “fatness” in this passage has the sense of strength and fullness, tinged with the notion of “choiceness.”

In the Old Covenant the “fat” of the sacrifice was reserved for the Lord: “All the fat shall be the Lord’s” (Leviticus 3:16 DR). The priests and people were forbidden from eating the fat of the sacrifices (cf. Leviticus 3:17). Some try and retcon these passages within a modern mindset by saying that since (as the modern notion has it) fat is bad, this is the reason God forbade them eating the fat of the sacrifices. However, the opposite is the case, for the fat was considered to be the choicest parts of the sacrifice, which is why to burn all the fat without eating it was a sacrifice. The priest Eli had two sons who forsook this injunction and not scandalized the people so badly that the people stopped offering sacrifice (cf. 1 Samuel 2:17).

The Psalmist isn’t asking to eat the fat of the sacrifices but is rather alluding to this sacrificial reality—he desires that the mercy and goodness of the Lord so fill him that his soul will be filled as with the choicest things, which the Lord’s mercy and goodness are. Marrow and fat were also seen as contributing to health and well-being, and he wishes the same for his soul:

Here is what he asked when he lifted his hands in prayer to God, that his “soul should be filled as with marrow and fatness;” that his soul should become replete with that spiritual marrow and fatness that acts upon the soul as the natural marrow and fatness do upon the body. Those who enjoy it are generally sound, strong, active, ruddy, and good humored; on the other hand, those who lack it are shriveled, weak, deformed, and gloomy; so those who are full of grace, of the spiritual richness here described, are devout, fervent, always in good temper; while, on the contrary, those who have it not, nauseate everything spiritual, are wasted away by listlessness; being quite weak and infirm, they can neither resist anything bad, nor do anything good. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 62, 5.)

In this life we have the constant experience of eating and then being hungry again, of obtaining some good only for the pleasure of it to fade with time. All these unfulfilled longings are part of our exile in the desert of the Psalmist and point to the country to which we are on pilgrimage. Our unfulfilled desires exist because our souls can only be filled by the infinite, which God Himself:

St. Augustine properly observes, that while we are in this desert, we cannot ask for and desire the feast of wisdom and justice, which we can only enjoy when we shall have arrived at our country; then will the expression of the Psalm, “And filleth thee with the fat of corn,” be fulfilled, as also that in Mat. 8, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice, for they shall be filled;” and then, “my mouth,” for praise shall succeed to prayer, shall perfectly, without end, without tiring, praise God, “with joyful lips;” when we shall be so full that we shall want nothing; for, at present, no matter what we have, we always want something still; and thus we must have recourse to daily and constant prayer. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 62, 5.)

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I’m not exactly sure what prompted this animation idea, but I found this cross section of a thigh and thought it might be interesting to inject marrow into the bone which then would radiate out to the rest of the thigh.

I isolated the thigh and syringe in Photoshop and brought both into Photoshop. I precomped the thigh and drew some mattes around the muscles and used those mattes to reveal some nice abstract textures.

In the main composition I animated the syringe coming in and then the stopper being depressed and animated the new texture in time with that. I also animated a radiating matte to reveal the same texture in the thigh as the syringe emptied its contents.

There is a certain cringe factor to this for me personally, for I have had needles stuck into my bones to extract marrow, which is—shall we say—not exactly a pleasant experience.

But sacrifices must be made.

Enjoy.

View a higher quality version of this gif here: