Anam Cara

Praise Is Like Morning Sun on a Flower

The Bible respects and extols particularly the prayer of praise. It is interesting to ask why the prayer of praise is honoured. Perhaps the reason is to be discovered in a consideration of the nature of praise. There is a lovely saying in Irish: “Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí,” i.e., Praise youth and it will blossom. Praise issues from recognition and generosity. It has nothing to do with the politics and manipulation of flattery. Praise is truthful affirmation. God has no need of your praise. Yet the act of praising draws you way outside the frontiers of your smallness. To praise awakens the more generous side of your heart. It draws out the nobility, the úaisleacht, in you. When the soul praises, the life enlarges. We know as individuals how encouraging praise can be. It is like watching Nature on a spring morning. At first, the flowers are all closed and withdrawn. Then, ever so gradually, as the rays of the sun coax them, they open out their hearts to praise the light. The diminishing of praise is an acute poverty in post-modern culture. With the swell of consumerism and technology and the demise of religion, we are losing our ability to praise. We replace praise with banal satisfaction. The absence of praise reduces culture to a flat monoscape; the magic of its creative and imaginative curvature gets lost. A culture that cannot praise the Divine becomes a bare, cold place. The demise of religious and spiritual practice has contributed hugely to this flattening.

One can understand how a culture that has come of age can find little shelter or resonance in the way many of the rituals of institutional religion are practised. Increasing numbers of people stay away. Others attempt to develop their own rituals. The difficulty here is that a deeply resonant ritual emerges over years out of the rhythms of longing and belonging in a community. Great ritual creates an imaginative and symbolic frame which can awaken the numinous otherness, the tenderness, and the danger of the Divine. It is a subtle and infinitely penetrating form. Scattered, isolated individuals cannot invent ritual. Consumerism has stolen the sacred ritual structures of religion and uses them incisively in its liturgies of advertising and marketing. Meanwhile the post-modern soul becomes poorer and falls even further from the embrace and practice of sacred belonging. The great thing about a community at prayer is that your prayer helps mine—as mine helps yours. This makes no consumerist sense, but it is one of the most vivid enhancements of Being available to us. Individualism of the raw competitive kind is ignorant of this dimension.