IN PRAISE OF PRAISE
South clerestory windows, Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Detroit. Photo courtesy of the author.
It is late spring of 2022 as I sit down to write this essay, and the situation of American society at the present moment can only politely be described as “extremely bad.” I shall spare you a recitation of the present moment’s horrors, in part because I am sure there will be horrors both old and fresh in whatever time and place this essay finds you, and in part because I don’t want you to be so exhausted by the first paragraph that you cannot continue reading.
I find myself reacting to the present moment in various ways. I sit before my prayer candles, quiet tears dripping off my face. I get testy with God while scrubbing the dishes (I have a tendency to rage clean). In moments of intense distress I feel like I am floating up and out of my own body. I know my own stress response well enough by this point that I can track the stages, checking off each level of descent as though I am headed down a spiral staircase that reaches several stories underground. At the very bottom of the staircase there are no tears; neither are there rage, full body tremors, vengeful fantasies, or the Lamentations of Jeremiah.
Instead there is music: When peace like a river attendeth my way / When sorrows like sea billows roll / Whatever my lot / Thou hast taught me to say / It is well, it is well with my soul. (1) This may understandably be seen as an odd response. When things are going badly—when there is real pain and suffering—how is a hymn of praise a logical response? Furthermore, in light of some of the language found in the hymns I love (“Whatever my lot”? Seriously?) how is it a healthy one?
I turn to praise in the midst of deep darkness because praising God reminds me of a number of truths, and these truths in turn bring me comfort and hope.
Firstly, it reminds me that God is not the source of my pain. It is true that I am God’s creation, and that my sorrows exist in the most basic sense because I exist. I do also live in and alongside God’s creation, some members of which do not think I have humanity and would frankly prefer that I were dead. But while I believe that the Cross and Passion of Christ show us that God can suit all things to God’s purpose, I do not believe that God has somehow intentionally set awful things in motion within the world God has created. To believe this would mean, for me, that I worshipped a deity devoid of love.
I would not worship such a God, but fortunately Christianity does not require of it me. The logic flows instead in the opposite direction—because Christianity teaches me that God is loving as well as good, and beautiful, and true, it holds that God does not set suffering upon us for the sake of proving God’s own power, or to disproportionally punish us for our failure to align our will to God’s. (2) I can instead lay the source of my suffering at the feet of pride, greed, hatred, and the physical condition of my body. (3) God has created the world in which I suffer, but God is not that suffering’s source.
There are two more great truths about God that hymns remind me of, both of which keep me trailing after Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years after his blessed feet last touched this earth: the God I worship is a God who has suffered, and were the whole world to turn its face from me and leave me comfortless, God would not. God will not and does not. The Lord, as Hagar said, is the God who sees. (4)
One of the joys in a faith rooted in several thousand years of tradition is that there is an extensive body of work on this subject. When I am in such distress that words fail me, all I have to do is reach for what my ancestors in faith have already written. Participating in this lineage of praise reminds me that my suffering is not unique, or even particularly new. Generations of Christians have sung “Thou art with me in earth’s sadness, Jesus all my gladness.” (5) The song allows me the same experience as one who stands in the midst of a great cathedral whose stairs have been worn uneven by a thousand or more years of pilgrim feet. I am only the latest person to pass this way, and many more will pass the same way and sing the same song after I am gone.
From this reminder of both my own smallness and my fellowship in the communion of saints, I am able to turn my mind to God’s goodness in more detail. Not only is God not the source of my sorrows, God is the source of my life and every good thing. Although not itself a hymn, I often conclude my private hymn sings with the General Thanksgiving: “We bless Thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life…for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.” These are my favorite lines in the entire Book of Common Prayer.
Thanking God for the good in my life is not the same as saying, “Things could be much worse; be grateful for what you do have and that you’re not as badly off as other people.” By the time I have gotten to this point in prayer I have spent plenty of time meditating on what’s wrong and I am usually in danger of winding myself up for no purpose except exhaustion. This is one of the ways in which I am not very different from the toddlers I have cared for, and I thank them for helping me to this realization about myself. I also thank them for helping me hone my Mary Poppins impression, which I have found to be effective in calming them down. Unfortunately my Mary Poppins impression is less effective on myself, but this is where the soothing effect of praise comes in.
I am unsure how directly, and to what degree, the hand of God is at work in my life, but I know that God is at work somehow. Remembering the many joys and blessings I experience is a counterweight to meditation on my suffering. The priest who heard my first confession when I was a child instructed me in the importance of thanking God, in part because it’s good manners, but also because it safeguards against despair. He didn’t come right out and say this to an elementary schooler, but he did assign me Psalm 100 to mediate on as penance: “O be joyful in the Lord all ye lands, serve the Lord with gladness, and come before his presence with a song.” (6) We are only meant to spend so much time thinking on our sins and sorrows. At the end of the day, God is greater than all of it.
This last point is, I believe, the reason my mind turns to praise when I am flattened by pain or grief or sorrow: when there is nowhere left to go, there is still somewhere, and that somewhere is the arms of God. I am compelled to reaffirm my conviction that “all my hope on God is founded,” (7) and if I can rest in the knowledge that I am being cared for by a deity who is “in all His words most wonderful, most sure in all His ways,” (8) then I can make it one more day without crumpling forever in despair. The practice of praise replenishes hope, and hope is no fragile, static thing. It is a flame, and a foundation, and a middle finger to the forces of darkness.
Far from being a perverse reaction to pain, the practice of praise comforts, instructs, and fortifies. The sorrows of life can feel relentless—at many times, they are relentless. Ameliorating their effect on my soul requires equally relentless praise, to remind me of who God is and how God cares for me, and has always done so.
For love in creation / For heaven restored / For grace of salvation / O praise ye the Lord. (9)
Horatio Spafford (1828-1888). For a fuller history of this hymn than the scope of this essay permits, see this video discussion from the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Detroit.
The key word here is disproportionally—sin often results in suffering that may be experienced as punishment, although, as Julian of Norwich points out, this suffering is often just the consequence of the sin itself, in which case one can argue that we, not God, have made our own punishment.
Unlike suffering imposed by sin, which has an immoral source on account of it being, well, sin, I find the suffering I experience because of my body to be both amoral and without meaning. Therefore, my relationship to this type of suffering differs from suffering imposed by sin, but it is still not pain that God has directly and willfully inflicted on me.
Genesis 16:13
Johann Franck (1618-1677) as translated by Arthur Wellesley Wotherspoon (1853-1936)
Trans. Miles Coverdale (c. 1488-1569)
Joachim Neander (1650-1680) as translated by Robert Bridges (1844-1930)
John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
Henry Williams Baker (1821-1877)
