Catholic Commentary
The Turning Point: Resolving to Remember God's Works
10Then I thought, “I will appeal to this: the years of the right hand of the Most High.”11I will remember Yah’s deeds; for I will remember your wonders of old.12I will also meditate on all your work, and consider your doings.
Psalms 77:10–12 describes the psalmist's deliberate decision to remember God's historical saving acts as a means of restoring faith during distress. Through active remembrance and meditation on God's works, the sufferer moves from lament toward renewed address and communion with God, transforming past deeds into present spiritual reality.
When darkness deepens, the psalmist doesn't wait to feel better—he wills himself to remember God's past faithfulness, transforming despair into prayer.
Psalms 77:10 — "Then I thought, 'I will appeal to this'"
The Hebrew of verse 10 is deliberately terse and even ambiguous — ḥallôṯî hî' — which many translators render with difficulty, capturing what feels like a man grasping for a handhold on a sheer cliff. The phrase "I will appeal to this" functions as a hinge. The psalmist has just catalogued his suffering: sleepless nights, a hand stretched out in exhausted prayer, a spirit that refuses comfort (vv. 2–4), and an anguished question about whether God has "forgotten to be gracious" (v. 9). Now, something shifts — not in his circumstances, but in his interior disposition. The word ḥallôṯî can carry a sense of "to begin," or even "to wound/weaken," suggesting the very act of turning takes effort, even pain. This is no easy pivot. It is a willed decision made in the dark, before any consolation has arrived. The "this" he appeals to is what immediately follows: the remembrance of God's historical works. He is choosing his medicine before he feels its effects.
Psalms 77:11 — "I will remember Yah's deeds"
The use of the shortened divine name Yah (a contraction of YHWH, also found in the Hallelu-Yah of the Psalter) is intimate and charged with reverence. "Yah's deeds" (ma'alĕlê-Yāh) refers specifically to God's saving acts in history — the Exodus, the parting of the Red Sea, the wilderness manna, the entry into Canaan. The verb zakar ("to remember") in Hebrew is never merely cognitive. To remember in the biblical sense is to re-activate a relationship, to make the past present, to allow a prior saving event to bear upon a current crisis. The psalmist does not say "I will think fondly of the old days." He says: I will invoke those deeds as living realities that still define who God is and therefore what God can do now. This is the logic of liturgical anamnesis — the Church's memoria — applied to personal prayer.
Psalms 77:12 — "I will also meditate on all your work"
The shift from third person ("Yah's deeds," v. 11) to second person ("your work," v. 12) is theologically electric. In the act of remembering, the psalmist moves from reflection about God to address directed toward God. Memory becomes prayer. The verb śiaḥ ("meditate") implies not silent rumination but murmuring aloud — the kind of low, audible repetition associated with ancient lectio divina, where the lips move and the body participates. The word "all" (kol) is emphatic: not some curated selection of comfortable memories, but the totality of God's acts — including those whose meaning remains opaque. The psalmist will meditate on what he does not yet understand, trusting that the act of meditation is itself transformative.
The Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the typological sense, the psalmist's act of deliberate remembrance prefigures the Eucharistic anamnesis instituted by Christ at the Last Supper — "Do this in memory of me" (Lk 22:19). The "deeds of Yah" find their fulfillment in the Paschal Mystery: the definitive Exodus from sin and death accomplished in the death and resurrection of Christ. The three-verse movement — crisis, decision, memory-turned-to-address — mirrors the interior structure of conversion: from desolation, through will, to renewed encounter. The Church Fathers, particularly St. Augustine in his Confessions, recognized this dynamic: "our heart is restless until it rests in Thee" — but the restlessness is resolved not by feeling but by remembering and returning.
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates these verses through the lens of both liturgical anamnesis and the theology of the will in spiritual desolation.
Anamnesis and Eucharistic Memory: The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the Eucharist is the memorial of Christ's Passover, the making present and the sacramental offering of his unique sacrifice" (CCC 1362). The psalmist's zakar — his resolute act of memory — is the spiritual forerunner of the Church's supreme act of anamnesis. To "remember God's deeds" is not nostalgia but participation in saving history made present. The Mass itself is the answer to the psalmist's method: the community gathers precisely to do what he does here, redirecting desolation into proclamation.
The Will in Desolation — St. Ignatius and the Tradition: St. Ignatius of Loyola, building on Cassian and St. John of the Cross, taught that in times of spiritual desolation, one must not change one's prior resolution (Spiritual Exercises, §318). The psalmist embodies this exactly: he makes a decision — "I will appeal to this" — before feeling consolation, precisely because desolation is not the time to renegotiate one's relationship with God. St. John of the Cross would call this the passage through the noche oscura, where the will must cling to God in pure faith, unsupported by felt experience.
The Church Fathers: St. Basil the Great, in his Homilies on the Psalms, emphasizes that the remembrance of God's works is the foundational act of faith — it reconnects the believer to the God who has already acted and thus grounds hope in objective fact rather than subjective feeling. St. Ambrose similarly notes that meditatio on God's works is the soul's true medicine in affliction.
Vatican II and Dei Verbum: Dei Verbum §2 reminds us that divine revelation is constituted by deeds and words — gestis verbisque — and that recalling these deeds is itself an act of receiving revelation anew. The psalmist's meditation is, in this light, a renewed act of faith in God's self-disclosure through history.
Every Catholic will encounter seasons of what the tradition calls spiritual desolation — periods when God feels absent, prayer feels hollow, and past faith seems like a fragile thing. Psalms 77:10–12 offers a remarkably concrete remedy that does not demand we feel our way out of the darkness: it demands we remember our way out.
The practical application is this: when consolation fails, make a deliberate, willed act of recollection. Keep a written record — a journal, a prayer book, a list — of moments when God has demonstrably acted in your life: answered prayers, graces received, sacramental encounters, providential turns. The psalmist's method was precisely this kind of structured recall. When darkness comes, he does not wait for the feeling to change; he reaches for the record.
For Catholics, this is inseparable from liturgical life. Attending Mass in desolation — even when it feels mechanical or empty — is the communal form of what the psalmist does privately. The Eucharist is the Church's great act of "I will remember Yah's deeds," transforming the most desolate personal moment into participation in the definitive saving act of history. The movement from "Yah's deeds" (v. 11) to "your work" (v. 12) — from memory to address — models how remembering, done faithfully, becomes encounter.
Commentary