Psalm 83:3
the end of all desire
My soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God. (Psalm 83:3 DR)
We have each likely had the experience of desiring something so deeply that it seems to consume the entirety of one’s life. Perhaps this is most distinctly felt when one is first in love; the whole world seems to stop and reorient itself to that desire. Thoughts are not able to stray far from the beloved, nor do normal pleasures and goods seem to have any allure or satisfaction. Even things like food seem to lose their taste.
There is a certain ecstasy in this experience as one almost seems to go outside of oneself for the sake of the beloved. We for good reason sometimes call this being lovesick for not only does it seem to take over everything and make the person useless for anything else, but if the love is not requited the devastation is palpable.
There are of course others kinds of desire which—while perhaps not as obvious and keenly felt as the aforementioned—are perhaps deeper. For as overwhelming as the experience of being in love is, it is also one of the most fleeting, incapable of lasting in such a state even if the object of affection is attained. And while this makes it no less real, it is meant to give way to permanence by means of an act of the will which is not dependent on the fluctuations and vacillations of emotions or desires.
The Psalmist here describes a sort of ecstasy of desire, in which he deeply longs to be within the courts of the Lord. There is an emotional aspect to this, of course, but since his soul longs and faints for the courts of the Lord there is embedded here an understanding that such a desire arises not from emotion but from his will to be in union with his Lord. He understands his soul as unable to stand, as it were, if he is not near unto God, for he understands that his soul was made to be within the courts of the Lord.
The fainting that his soul experiences is that of the situation of exile, for in this world we do not fully attain what we long for, even if we obtain what we think we desire. We have all experienced obtaining the thing we wanted and then losing interest or finding that it does not satisfy, for that is the natural of created things; they are unable to fulfill our desires.
The desire of the soul is for God and God alone, and only He is able to bring it to rest. In our exile we catch glimpses of our eternal homeland, but we must never delude ourselves that we have arrived.
The courts of the Lord that the Psalmist longs—while ultimately pointing to the Beatific Vision—are nevertheless fulfilled at Mass where Heaven and Earth meet in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Eucharist as Christ being truly present, body blood, soul and divinity, is a foretaste of the courts of the Lord for we receive that toward which we are pilgriming. The obligation to worship and to assist at Mass every week is thus a great mercy, for the longing and desire that the Psalmist expresses here is able to be satiated at the altar; what he could only glimpse in shadows we have now in reality.
For this animation I found an image of St. Augustine, I believe, holding a flaming heart which I thought would be a great base for this. I used Trapcode Particular to create the flame effects, and then drew some concentric circles and used masks to set the various texts to the paths of those circles, and then parented them to the circles and added rotation.
I then precomped each circle and text and duplicated it, inverting the colors. I finally used a couple mattes that revealed the inversion in a pulse movement to give it a nice bit of visual interest.
Enjoy.
My soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God.
(Psalm 83:3 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: