I have been taught that there are three types of prayer: thanking God; asking for God’s intercession; and praising God.
I feel deeply and always and everywhere the need to thank God for the many blessings He has given me.
And I certainly have a long list of things I ask Him to intercede for, leading with the healing of so many loved ones. Those suffering from physical or mental illness or persecution or other ills inflicted by other people.
But I have long felt ambivalent about the “praise” component. Praising the God who created and rules the universe, well, that has always struck me as odd: like telling Jascha Heifitz or Itzhak Perlman “You are a very good violinist.” I may have been unduly influenced by the Monty Python sketch in “The Meaning of Life” in which a priest makes a groveling, obsequious prayer beginning with “Oh Lord, Ooooh, you are so big! All of us down here are really impressed with you…”
So why do we make a big deal about praising God? To flatter Him? Unlikely. To please Him? Maybe. To demonstrate our humility? That sounds closer. Then I stumbled on the answer: it is to build and maintain the foundation of true humility in us. Or at least in me.
The Psalms make this clear. Amidst all these hymns of praise, we read:
“Know ye that the Lord He is God. It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves. We are His people and the sheep of his pasture.” (100:3)
I am sometimes asked what my religion was before I came to the Catholic Church. My answer is “Self Worship.” I was a faithful believer in myself, as the center of the universe, the protagonist, star, and hero of the story. When I realized that this was absurd (or at least a slight exaggeration), the scales fell from my eyes. And I learned that all the sin in my life was the result of my Pride in my starring role.
That is why we praise Him. To remind ourselves that He is God and we are not. A reminder which I need every day, every hour, every minute. The sheep of his pasture like me can easily forget it.
(And that is why I gave up looking to Monty Python for religious instruction. Though they were early leaders about the insanity of “transgenderism”.)
