Which my lips have uttered, And my mouth hath spoken, when I was in trouble. (Psalm 65:14 DR)
When we want to communicate the importance, sacrality or solemnity of an idea, we will often set it apart in some manner from normal modes of communication. The ceremonies and words and such with which we clothe such things are not merely ornamentation, but rather our way as embodied creatures of demonstrating the interior disposition of our hearts.
The formality, sacrality and solemnity of liturgy in service of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is an example of this. And while the actual Mass itself could be an extremely simple affair in which only the necessary words are spoken by the priest or bishop, outside of extremely unusual circumstances the lack of additional prayers or music or ornamentation and the like would indicate that we really don’t believe what we are saying or doing.
For embodied creatures it is those extra things that surround and clothe the words we speak and the actions we take which set them apart or distinguish them from the ordinary and the banal. The angels as pure intellect immediately behold with their intellect the substances presented to them.* We, on the other hand, have anything which is in our minds mediated through our senses, and the discursive nature of our reasoning means that we do not just apprehend truth intuitively or immediately like the angels, but rather through signs and symbols like words and gestures.
We thus normally communicate importance or sacrality or solemnity by setting off words and events and actions in some manner from other things. In this manner the distinction and juxtaposition becomes the means of communicating what our interior disposition is, or at least provides the vehicle for that. It is, of course, possible for us to go through the motions, but that is a defect in will rather than in the mode of distinction.
The Psalmist continues his previous thought here into this passage, which the Douay-Rheims somewhat unhelpfully splits at an awkward place, for the beginning of this passage is meant to be part of the parallelism of the end of the previous passage, such that it reads: I will pay Thee my vows, which my lips have uttered. In fact, verses 13-14 are a series of expanding parallelisms. The Psalmist going into the house of the Lord with burnt offerings is expanded upon and explained by the vows that the Psalmist will pay, and these vows themselves are the culmination of what the Psalmist has uttered with lips in the day of his trouble. In some respects we move backwards in time—as it were—through the reading of these three clauses, and we see the genesis of his offering burnt offerings to the Lord in the house of God.
His vow was when he was in trouble, that he would bring to the Lord the fullness of sacrifice—which he will further elaborate on in the following passage. He made this vow when he was in trouble, and we now see the fulfillment of that vow, which implies that he vowed to the Lord to bring this sacrifice if the Lord should bring him out of that trouble. Since the Psalmist is now speaking in retrospect, he was evidently delivered from his trouble and thus prepared to fulfill his vow.
This could—at first blush—seem a rather crass transactional quid pro quo on the Psalmist’s part. There is the cliché—perhaps more from the movies than from reality—of the soldier in the foxhole who promises that he will become a priest if God gets him out alive. This seems on the surface to be a similar situation, even if we do not know exactly what was the trouble the Psalmist speaks of.
However, from the passages immediately preceding this, we can see that he is not speaking in merely transactional terms. It is of course normal and very human to make such promises to God in the midst of trouble, but—as was seen earlier— the Psalmist is aware that this trouble is not merely random but rather the means of God proving and trying his people— For thou, O God, hast proved us: thou hast tried us by fire, as silver is tried. Thus, this vow to God—even if made in extremity—is not merely a quid pro quo but arises from a will that is already set on the Lord and is far more a response to the goodness of the Lord than in trying to manipulate God into doing what he wants. That is, the terrible works of God that the Psalmist began this Psalm with—which include His goodness to His people—are the motivating factor behind these vows which the Psalmist makes.
In this manner the vows made in distress are not about him trying to manipulate God, but rather a deeper expression of his own faith and trust. Yet vows are not to be taken lightly, and even those made in extremity must be fulfilled, as St. Thomas More explains in A Man for All Seasons:
When a man takes an oath, he’s holding his own self in his own hands like water, and if he opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find himself again.
The Psalmist makes such vows not because he hopes to pressure God into helping him, but rather because he already hopes in God and vows his vow as a further and deeper expression of that. He uses his vow as a way to set apart his prayer unto the Lord, and by taking upon himself this vow he demonstrates the interior depth of his trust in God and his hope that God will deliver him. The extremities he faced may on the emotional level have prompted such a vow, but his will is what formalizes it.
This is why after being delivered he does not use the extremity of his situation as an excuse to renege on his vow, but rather fulfills it. God doesn’t need his fulfillment, but the Psalmist does need to fulfill it, lest he open his fingers and lose himself forever. For if he can vow to God in extremities and be delivered, but then refuses to fulfill those vows, he only demonstrates that he acted in bad faith, that he was, after all, trying to manipulate God, that he saw his trust in the Lord only for what he could get out of it. But by paying his vow he shows in his actions that his words are genuine, that they arise from a sincere faith and a pure heart.
This vow of his was—after all—something serious. It was not made in the heat of the moment or based on a flash of emotion. Rather, it is that which my lips have uttered. In modern English the verb utter is often used synonymously with speak, but it etymologically has a more weighty sense. It seems to come from a joining of two verbs, the Middle Low German utern (to show, speak, turn out) and the Middle English outen (to disclose). The ultimate sense is something like to put forth, which has an intentionally that to speak doesn’t necessarily convey. (cf. Online Etymological Dictionary)
The use of the verb utter by the Douay-Rheims is to translate the term distinxerunt from the Vulgate, which on a strictly literal level means—as the cognate suggests—to distinguish, set apart. But since the Psalmist is distinguishing with his speech, the sense is more of specifically articulating something. That is, he is not merely saying things haphazardly but being very specific in the vow that he is making to the Lord. He did not simply think these things or pray them internally, but rather formalized and solemnized his vow by means of the words that he uttered:
What is the distinction in vows? This is the distinction, that yourself thou censure, Him thou praise: perceive yourself to be a creature, Him the Creator: yourself darkness, Him the Enlightener, to whom you should say, You shall light my lamp, O Lord my God, You shall enlighten my darkness. For whenever you shall have said, O soul, that from yourself you have light, you will not distinguish. If you will not distinguish, you will not render distinct vows. Render distinct vows, confess yourself changeable, Him unchangeable: confess yourself without Him to be nothing, but Himself without you to be perfect; yourself to need Him, but Him not to need you. Cry to Him, I have said to the Lord, My God are You, for my good things You need not. Now though God takes you to Him for a holocaust, He grows not, He is not increased, He is not richer, He becomes not better furnished: whatsoever He makes of you for your sake, is the better for you, not for Him that makes. If you distinguish these things, you render the vows to your God which your lips have distinguished. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 65, 19.)
The reason for the uttering or distinguishing of this vow—and the making of it in the first place—is thus not to get something for himself from God, but rather that the Psalmist might himself be made the better. God gains nothing from his vow or the offering of sacrifice, but the Psalmist understands his nothingness before God and in this manner distinguishes his vow. His vow becomes a means of confessing himself nothing and God everything, of confessing his own unworthiness and God’s holiness.
The Psalmist utters his vow as an outward expression of his interior will and love for the Lord, and in this there is a figure of Baptism in which we also vow to the Lord to reject sin and the devil and to believe all that the Church teaches. We also vow to offer sacrifice in that of our own lives and of our own wills, as well as participating in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
In this distinguishing and utterance the Psalmist offers up the totality of himself and his will to God, for by vowing to offer sacrifice he vows to diminish himself for the sake of the Lord, to trust that God will accept His prayer and make of his sacrifice what He will.
*Update: In the first draft of this post I had stated that “the angels do not have liturgy or ceremony of any kind, but as pure intellect…” By this I was intending to contrast the outward manifestations of the way in which we as embodied beings participate in liturgy with that of the angels who are not embodied.
Prior to publishing I was re-reading and realized that this could be misunderstood as me saying that they do not participate in liturgy at all, which would be incorrect. The post was already scheduled to go out and was initially published a few seconds before I could make the changes, and so I unpublished that draft and re-edited the video and the post for clarity, since that particular point was not necessary to my overall point in that section.
I just wanted to have this as an explanation for anyone who happens upon the original version, so that there is no confusion. My apologies for any confusion.
I found an image of an old reel-to-reel machine and isolated it in Photoshop and then split out the reels so I could animate them in After Effects with some simple rotation and Motion Blur. I also cut out the sheep and applied some slight wiggle hold animation.
I put the text into a precomp and applied Motion Tile to it and animated the position, adding Wave Warp after the Motion Tile Effect to give it the distorted movement. I duplicated this precomp and changed the color and offset it in the composition and repeated this process for all the text.
I finally added in some textures and color correction.
Enjoy.
Which my lips have uttered, And my mouth hath spoken, when I was in trouble.
(Psalm 65:14 DR)
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