The prayer of praise naturally comes out of minds
and hearts that realize
their position of privilege in the plan of salvation.

Praise and privilege

By W. Patrick Cunningham

My life in a religious community encompassed only four years, but the habits acquired in that brief time have been astonishingly persistent. Each morning, upon rising, we were trained to recite a psalm of praise: “Praise, you servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord . . . from the rising of the sun to its setting, may the name of the Lord be praised” (Ps. 113). In a society trained to moan how awful it is to get up at an “ungodly” hour, and to concentrate all one’s initial energies on obtaining some source of caffeine, rising to focus on godly praise is distinctly counter-cultural and marvelously empowering.

Teaching young students to praise God is an education for both teacher and learner. Young Catholics ordinarily have a notion of how to thank others for some gift or service, so they have a real, if underdeveloped sense of how to thank God. Pure praise, however, is in another category. True, they are used to singing “Alleluia,” and occasionally know that it means “Praise the Lord.” Still, the Hebrew form acts as a meaning screen — they don’t have to think about what it means, and so its performance tends to decay into a religious form of “Hurray.”

Variants of the word “praise” appear several hundred times in Scripture, in both the Hebrew and Christian Testaments. The psalms are the richest vein of praise in both Testaments, and themselves constitute a kind of textbook on praise. Praise, or blessing, expressed in the Hebrew term berekah, is the human arm of the “encounter between God and man. In blessing, God’s gift and man’s acceptance of it are united in dialogue with each other. The prayer of blessing is man’s response to God’s gifts . . .” (CCC 2626). The English phrase “Praise to You, O Lord” and the Hebraized “Blessed are You, O Lord” are equivalent responses to the divine initiative of love that is the Holy Spirit, and is expressed in the multiform gifts of the Spirit.

Praise always
Praise may come most naturally to one who is feeling blessed, but one of the recurring prayer-themes in both Testaments is the connection between suffering and praise. Psalm 22, which was almost certainly prayed on the cross by Jesus (Matt. 27:46), begins with the almost nihilistic phrase “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” The psalm recounts horrible suffering, yet ends in ten verses of praise and adoration. Psalm 30 gives praise to God as the author of the “reversal of fortune,” and gives us the inspiring line: “At nightfall weeping enters in, but with the dawn, rejoicing.” In psalm 42, the singer pours out his anguish over his exile from Temple worship, yet expresses confidence that he will again praise God in liturgical song.

The doctrine that praise should be a kind of automatic response to suffering, which was implicit in the psalms and especially in Job 1:21, is made explicit in the writings of St. Paul. An early teaching (1 Thes. 5:16-22) may also be considered a primitive summary of Christian living: “Rejoice always; pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophetic utterances. Test everything; retain what is good. Refrain from every kind of evil.”

In this passage, Paul uses the verb eucharisteite, which refers to “good gifts.” In other passages, he uses the words eulogia (good words, usually rendered “blessings”) and doxa (glory) when referring to praise. There would appear to be a confusion even in the original languages between praise and thanksgiving.

We should not be taken aback by any seeming muddle in the New Testament between praise and thanksgiving. We in the west traditionally divide prayer into four categories of praise, thanksgiving, supplication (intercession) and repentance. However, St. Thomas Aquinas, after 1 Tim. 2:1, “fittingly” describes prayer as consisting of “supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings” (Summa Theologica, II-II Q. 83 Art. 17). Thomas maintains that the whole of the Church’s prayer is engaged in those four activities. He implies that supplication contains the act of repentance, for the purpose of that prayer is “to implore mercy.” The Catechism’s treatise on prayer (CCC 2626-2643) divides prayer into slightly different categories: blessing/ adoration, petition, intercession, thanksgiving and praise. In praise, we acknowledge God for his own sake, giving him glory because “He is.” Thus we may distinguish between praise as our response to God’s existence, and thanks as our response to God’s actions.

Now the Church reminds us that the sacrament of the Eucharist “contains and expresses all forms of prayer,” and is rightly called the “sacrifice of praise” (CCC 2643). In this phrase we can find a principle of solution and a useful idea for pedagogy. It is in the plan of God freely to create, to redeem and to sanctify creation. In the extreme act of divine compassion and condescension (Phil. 2:6-8) the Word became flesh, became a servant, and assumed such solidarity with humanity as to suffer the cruelest of deaths for us. This movement is not seen by the Church as a surprise, but as an action that follows quite logically from the divine nature. At the dawn of redemption, when Yahweh freed a chosen people from slavery, he had revealed himself as “naturally” generous beyond human imagination: “The LORD, the LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity, continuing his kindness for a thousand generations, and forgiving wickedness and crime and sin; yet not declaring the guilty guiltless, but punishing children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation for their fathers’ wickedness!” (Exod. 34:6-7). It was the sense of election, of privilege, that suffused the poetry and theology of Israel, that empowered their prayer, especially their prayer of praise and thanksgiving. It shows itself most clearly in Psalm 136, the grand historical litany, where each divine action is enumerated and responded to by all: “his loving-kindness endures forever.”

It is in John 1 that we see clearly outlined in New Testament language what was prophesied in Exodus 34. The Logos, the Son of God, became flesh. The Word became human, the Word became weakness. Through his life, death and resurrection, he then could raise us up to a new fullness and strength (John 1:16), so that the promise to the thousandth generation could be fulfilled. It is the enduring sense of election, of privilege, that gives the Christian an enduring hope, even in darkness (John 1:5). This is the reason there are no lamentations in the Christian Scriptures; this is the reason that, despite persecutions and resistance, the early Christian authors were able to focus on the Church’s praise, thanksgiving and glory. Just as it is difficult for the human mind to distinguish between who God is and what he does, so the prayers of praise and thanksgiving tend to overlap and to strengthen each other.

Teach your children well
How do we teach Catholics, young or old, to praise God? Our pedagogy of divine praise must appeal to the learner’s experience of human relationships in order to explain our connection to the divine. Almost every child has learned from the age of two how to say “thank you” for some desired object. The teacher has it easy when teaching the act of thanks: it goes along with “please” and if those two “magic words” aren’t said, the candy or other treat is withheld. The child by habit knows that the act of thanksgiving should be offered just as soon as the gift is received, or perceived.

Praise, however, is something first perceived by a child as something received by the child. When a baby takes her first steps, Mom and Dad (and everyone connected by rapid-dial telephone) praise the action. Each and every growth phase is accompanied by praise. There is nothing wrong with this — it is much wiser to reward positive actions than to punish negative ones — but it inculcates the notion that praise is something we get, rather than a blessing we give. When Mom or Dad are recognized for some accomplishment, too often the child ignores it, or says something like “that’s nice” before going back to what he wants to be doing. This is not unexpected, because praise of another is the action of a mature person. This lack of experience with giving praise does impede the teacher or preacher who is helping young persons learn how to praise God.

We can, however, manipulate the environment of the learner or worshiper to make praise seem easier and more natural. The most helpful device is simply to sing praise. I’ve used Roberta McGrath’s “Everybody Sing Alleluia” (1975) for decades, with pre-kindergarten children all the way through fifth grade, to teach praise. There are, in fact, hundreds of songs and anthems up to and including the magnificent Gregorian alleluias of the Graduale Romanum, and, of course, the choral works of Handel, especially the Messiah choruses and “Praise the Lord” from Judas Maccabeus. All the preacher needs to do after such a song is sung is to remind the singers and listeners of what they have just been doing, and why.

In that light, the rather frequent omission of the “Glory to God” from the Masses in which it is prescribed, reported from time to time in the Catholic press, seems especially distressing. The practice of jumping right from the penitential rite to the opening collect has been advocated by some “reformers” as a way of restoring a more “primitive” practice. Other, more “practical” change-agents favor the elimination of the Gloria as a time-saver. To the former, one might ask whether more primitive always means better. Or, more pertinently, one might respond that the Gloria is an old prayer indeed, predating most of the Fathers of the Church. To eliminate it is truly to make the whole year like Lent. To the latter, one can only answer that anyone who would overturn the Church’s liturgy and eliminate the first element of the “sacrifice of praise” certainly values 35 seconds more than the Church’s praise relationship to the King of Kings.

The “Glory to God” is one of two prayers used frequently in the Latin Rite that has adoration and praise alone as its function. The other, of course, is the Te Deum, which is sung on special feasts during the hour of Matins (“Office of Readings”). The Te Deum is also an ancient hymn; a very old, but almost certainly incorrect legend has it that Augustine and Ambrose composed it together after the former’s baptism. We in the U.S. labor under a dreadful English translation that begins by seeming to tell God something he already is well aware of (“You are God”), but even in that rendering, the hymn is unparalleled. The ranks of angels, the holy apostles, and the countless martyrs to Christ are all asked to join in the angelic hymn. But, remarkably, the “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth. . .” familiar from the Eucharistic prayer, is not ended in the Te Deum with the Palm Sunday prayer “Hosanna in excelsis.” This latter exclamation, a profound cry for help derived from the psalms, is not present in the original prayer from Isaiah. Its omission emphasizes the “pure praise” nature of the Te Deum. This magnificent hymn of praise was for many years sung after major historic events, such as battles and the lifting of sieges. Many fine settings, such as Sowerby’s and Bruckner’s, are available. They deserve to be brought out for major occasions and feasts, and used to teach the Church new songs of praise.

If the Church is a “priestly people,” as St. Peter says, then we must also be a people of praise. The prayer of praise naturally comes out of minds and hearts that realize their position of privilege in the plan of salvation. We fulfill our mission of responding to who God is, and what he does, when we adore and worship and praise him with all our heart and all our voice. 

Mr. W. Patrick Cunningham received his B.A. and M.A. in theology from St. Mary’s University in Texas. He also earned an M.A. in education from Stanford University. He has taught business ethics at Incarnate Word College and is now teaching moral theology at Central Catholic Marianist High School in San Antonio, Texas. His last article in HPR appeared in January 2001.