See the Forest for the Bees

​A Reflection on the Psalm ​for Sunday, September 22nd, 2024:
Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

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Psalm 54 

​R. The Lord upholds my life.

Save me, O God, by your name, and vindicate me by your might. Hear my prayer, O God; give ear to the words of my mouth. 

​R. The Lord upholds my life.

For the insolent have risen against me, the ruthless seek my life; they do not set God before them. 

​R. The Lord upholds my life.

But surely, God is my helper; the Lord is the upholder of my life. With a freewill offering I will sacrifice to you; I will give thanks to your name, for it is good. 

​R. The Lord upholds my life.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

I learned a new word in reference to the title of this psalm: prolixity. It means “so wordy it’s boring.” You understand what I mean when I say that the full title of this psalm is: “A Maskil Of David, When The Ziphites Went And Told Saul, ’Is Not David Hiding Among Us?’”

As the title suggests, King David wrote this psalm during a time recounted in I Samuel when he’s hiding from Saul among the Ziphite people, and they betray his whereabouts.
“Ziphites,” if Saint Augustine is to be believed, can be translated into “the flourishing ones” —or, to avoid prolixity, the flowers.

David hides among the “flowers” – the Ziphites – because they are his kinsmen by blood and faith, so he considers them allies. But as Augustine says, the Ziphites are different from him “not in city, not in tribe, not in kindred, but in flower.” In this case, “flower” refers to the fruits for which they are working. Augustine doesn’t say what that particular flower is, but we know what it isn’t – we know they aren’t working to build up the Kingdom of God, because David writes “they do not set God before them.”

David prays to God to lift him from the flowers. He lifts up his soul, his life, to God. He doesn’t pray that the flowers be destroyed, for he knows that God will deal with them accordingly. Flowers and grasses die away.

David prays to be lifted above the flowers. I have stuck my nose into enough summer rosebushes to verify that the “thing that is above the flowers” is bees. In my imaginative prayer, then, David prays not for the destruction of the flowers, nor to become a flower, but to become a bee. To be able to fly away back to the fortress of the hive, to be nourished and cared for in safety while the flowers die out (I assume, since who’s ever heard of a Ziphite?).

But this metaphor (admittedly, of my own creation) poses a potential wrinkle. David prefigures Jesus. Jesus hid among humanity. Jesus was betrayed. Jesus lifted his soul to God the Father in sacrifice, who indeed raised Him on the third day.

But if the story were to end there, Jesus would have left His flowers to perish like the Ziphites. But of course He didn’t. At Pentecost, He sent the Holy Spirit to transform the apostles from flowers to bees, too. Through them, He gave us the sacraments, so that each of us can become bees. 
Flowers are pure products of their location, climate, soil, and sunlight. People are products of our environments, too. Through baptism and confirmation, we are transformed from creatures bound by those natural factors. We become creatures who can transcend those elements and spread life and nourishment to farther fields.
And not all flowers are the bad, Ziphite kind. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a thriving  human society. It’s just a matter of being able to discern the truly beautiful flowers, touch down on the petals, enjoy their nectars, and still take flight back to the heights. 

Bees do little wiggle dances to tell other bees where the good flowers are. So if you ever feel, like David, that you’ve gotten yourself into the wrong garden, or you read the news and think the garden may be in trouble, don’t despair. Through prayer, God will give you flight. Through His Church, He’ll give you wiggle dances that will point you to the perfect meadow.




​Kate Mosher

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