Praise

I bought a little booklet titled "Praying the Psalms" written by Thomas Merton. Here follows a little excerpt I thought a few of you would enjoy.

To praise God?

Do we really know what it means to praise? To adore? To give glory?

Praise is cheap today. Everything is praised. Soap, beer, toothpaste, clothing, mouthwash, movie stars, all the latest gadgets that are supposed to make life more comfortable--everything is constantly being "praised". Praise is now so overdone that everyone is sick of it, and since everything is "praised", with the official hollow enthusiasm of the radio announcer it turns out in the end that nothing is praised. Praise has become empty. Nobody really wants to use it.

Are there any superlatives left for God? They have all been wasted on foods and quack medicines. There is no word left to express our adoration of him, who alone is Holy, who alone is Lord.

So we go to Him to ask help and to get out of being punished, and to mumble that we need a better job, more money, more of the things that are praised by the advertisements. And we wonder why our prayer is so often dead--gaining its only life, borrowing its only urgency from the fact that we need these things so badly.

But we do not really think we need God. Least of all do we think we need to praise Him.

It is quite possible that our lack of interest in the Psalms conceals a secret lack of interest in God. For if we have no real interest in praising Him, it shows that we have never realized who He is. For when one becomes conscious of who God really is, and when one realizes that He who is Almighty, and infinitely Holy, has done "great things to us", the only possible reaction is the cry of a half-articulate exultation that bursts from the depths of our being in amazement at the tremendous, inexplicable goodness of God to men. The Psalms are all made up of such cries--cries of wonder, exultation, , anguish, or joy. The very concreteness of their passion makes some of them seem disjointed and senseless. Their spontaneity makes them songs without plan, because there are no blueprints for ecstacy.

Yet at the same time the Psalms are rugged and sober. Their emotions are controlled, and the very control increases their intensity. Add to this the even more plain sobriety with which the Church herself uses the Psalter, and we find that the tremendous impact of the Psalms is buried at a very deep spiritual level, and that we must pray on that level to feel it at all.

To say that the Psalms are deep is not to say that they are esoteric. One does not have to be a very unusual person in order to appreciate them. One has to be a healthy, simple person with a lot of faith and enough freedom from the tastes and predjudices of our time to be able to appreciate the imagery of another race and age. We must be, to some extent, "Orientals".