Catholic Commentary
Declaration of Love and God's Attentiveness
1I love Yahweh, because he listens to my voice, and my cries for mercy.2Because he has turned his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live.
Psalms 116:1–2 expresses the psalmist's love for God rooted in personal experience of being heard in prayer, with the two verses emphasizing divine attentiveness through both listening and the compassionate gesture of inclining an ear. The passage presents love not as commanded obligation but as a grateful response flowing from intimate encounter with God's mercy.
God bends his ear to hear your cry, and that act of listening becomes the fire that makes you love him in return.
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage with exceptional richness at several levels.
The Priority of God's Initiative. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God tirelessly calls every person to this mysterious encounter with himself" and that "prayer is a covenant relationship between God and man in Christ" (CCC §2564). Psalm 116:1–2 dramatizes precisely this: the human heart's love is awakened by God's prior act of listening. This is a scriptural icon of what the Catechism calls the "wonderful exchange" — God stoops to the creature, and the creature rises to love. St. Augustine captures this perfectly in the Confessions: "You made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you" — but equally, "Our heart is moved to call upon you by your word" (Confessions I.1). The love of Psalm 116:1 is a response to prevenient grace.
Christological Reading. The Letter to the Hebrews (5:7) explicitly references a psalm in which Christ "in the days of his flesh... offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard." The Fathers unanimously identified this with Psalm 116. Cassiodorus in his Expositio Psalmorum reads the entire psalm in persona Christi, so that "I love Yahweh" is the voice of the Incarnate Son expressing within human experience the eternal filial love that constitutes his divine Person. Vatican II's Dei Verbum §15 affirms that the Psalms find their fullest meaning in Christ.
Liturgical Life. Psalm 116 is one of the Hallel psalms (113–118) sung at Passover, and thus was on the lips of Jesus at the Last Supper (cf. Mt 26:30). The Church has long prayed it at Evening Prayer. In this context, the "love" of verse 1 is not merely private piety but a liturgical act — the Church's voice declaring, through the Liturgy of the Hours, her corporate love for the God who hears her prayer.
For a contemporary Catholic, Psalm 116:1–2 offers a corrective to two common distortions of the spiritual life. The first is a purely duty-based religion, in which God is obeyed but not loved. The psalmist does not say "I obey" or "I fear" but "I love" — and Catholic tradition insists that the whole moral and sacramental life is only rightly ordered when it flows from love (CCC §1822). Ask yourself: can you, like the psalmist, point to a specific moment — an answered prayer, a consolation in grief, a grace in the sacrament of Reconciliation — where God "turned his ear" to you? Let that memory become the fuel of your love, not an abstraction.
The second distortion is a therapeutic self-focus that treats prayer as a technique for inner peace rather than as encounter with a Person who listens. Verse 2's image of God inclining his ear is a standing rebuke to the idea that prayer is merely interior monologue. In a culture of noise and distraction, sit with this image: the God of the universe has bent his ear toward your voice. Let that reality precede every prayer you make today — not as a warm-up thought, but as the foundational conviction that makes prayer possible at all.
Commentary
Psalms 116:1 — "I love Yahweh, because he listens to my voice"
The opening word in the Hebrew is simply ʾāhavtî — "I love" — placed with arresting abruptness at the very beginning, without subject or qualifier. This is highly unusual in the Psalter; no other psalm begins with this first-person declaration of love for God. The verb ʾāhav (love) is the same word used in the great Shema-adjacent command of Deuteronomy 6:5 ("You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart"), but here the direction is reversed: it is the creature confessing love for the Creator, not being commanded to it. Love, in this verse, is not presented as an obligation but as a response — a free outpouring of the heart that has been moved by an experience of grace.
The causal conjunction kî ("because") is critical: the psalmist's love is not abstractly philosophical or based on God's cosmic attributes alone. It is grounded in testimony. God listens — the Hebrew šāmaʿ — to "my voice" (qôlî). This is deeply personal: not "to the voice of Israel," not "to the voice of the righteous," but to my voice. The particular, individual human cry has been heard by the LORD of all creation. The Psalmist's love flows from this intimacy.
Psalms 116:2 — "Because he has turned his ear to me"
The second verse elaborates and deepens the same truth through vivid anthropomorphism. God "turns" or "inclines" (nāṭāh) his ear (ʾoznô) — a physical gesture of attentive leaning-in, the image of a parent bending down to hear a child. The same phrase (nāṭāh ʾōzen) appears across the Psalter (Ps 31:2; 71:2; 86:1) as a recurring motif of God's compassionate condescension. What is distinctive here is that this gesture of divine attentiveness is not simply praised — it is offered as the cause of love.
The repetition of "because" (the Hebrew kî appears implicitly in v.2's continuation of v.1's thought) creates a rhetorical accumulation: the psalmist stacks reason upon reason, as if the single fact of God's listening is so overwhelming it must be stated twice from different angles. This is the grammar of a heart overwhelmed.
Read typologically, the Church Fathers heard in this psalm the voice of Christ himself in his Passion and in his prayer to the Father (see Hebrews 5:7). If the whole psalm is the voice of the Son crying out and being delivered from death, then these opening verses become the Incarnate Word's own declaration of filial love — the Son loves the Father the Father hears. The eternal love of the Trinity is here refracted through the glass of human experience and suffering. This reading, favored by Augustine and Cassiodorus, does not cancel the literal sense but transcends it: every believer who prays this psalm is caught up into Christ's own prayer.