Song of Praise and Thanksgiving

Come and hear, all who fear God; I will tell what the Lord did for my soul, alleluia (Ps. 66:16).

My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He Who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His Name (Magnificat).

Someone recently sent me an article proposing that we stop using the name “God,” because no one really knows what the term means.  Every religion uses the term to refer to different realities and for different purposes, and even within religions, each individual has a different reference point for the term “God.” 

When YHWH gave Moses His Name, He said, “I will be who I will be,” or “I Am Who I Am.”  I think it is clear that we will never “define” God for the ages; His very name is mysterious and beyond us.  That does not mean that He cannot be known, however.  He is known to us through our history, both personal and collective.  Someone once wrote, “God, it seems to me, is a verb.”  He is not a “noun,” for He is the beginning and the end of all action, of all thought, of all energy, of all that is.  We cannot know the “noun,” or “essence” of God; we can only know Him through what He has done for us, as Mary proclaimed.

I do not blame those who tire of hearing conflicting ideas about the Divinity, but those who are attempting to build a spirituality without “God” because He cannot be known are simply attempting to build a new Tower of Babel.  They say that religion is unnecessary, that man alone can “name” the spiritual forces that control the world.  They, like the Communists who built the Soviet Union, want to be in control of their own destiny without reference to a Supreme Being.  And their words, supposedly replacing the outmoded “doctrines” are endless and exhausting.  Not one of them speaks Truth, however, but only opinion – based on rationality, or what they “think.”  Not one of them can tell you of a personal relationship with God, of what God has done for them.

When we listen to a woman “define” her fiancée, she always does so in terms of who he is to her – “the kindest man I’ve ever known;” or “he completes me in so many ways,” etc.  It is always a “song” of praise and thanksgiving for having this special person as part of her life.  There is never a theoretical doctrine about who this person is or should be.  We "know" science through our reason, but we "know" other people -- including God -- through our hearts.

Psalm 66:16 says, “Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell you what He has done for me.” And Mary said, “My soul rejoices in God my Savior,….for He who is mighty has done great things for me.”  The only words I want to hear are from those who have a song of praise and thanksgiving, those who can tell me what God has done for them.  These are the “holy ones,” the “anawim,” the “little ones,” the ones who enter the kingdom of God as little children – without arguing or complaining, as Peter says, holding out the Word of Life to a darkened world.  In their stories, not in their theories, we come to want to know the God they have known. Jesus told Peter that if He did not wash Peter’s feet, Peter would have no part in Jesus.  If we have not allowed God, in His Son, to cleanse us from sin, we do not know who God is – the critics are right.  If people do not have a story, their ideas mean little to us.

But Mary knew for sure who God was: 

He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation.  He has shown the strength of his arm; he has scattered the proud in the conceit of their hearts.  He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.  He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.  He has come to the help of his servant Israel, for he has remembered his promise of mercy, the promise He made to our fathers, to Abraham and to his children forever.

When teaching writing, we always tell our students to give examples of what they think.  Surely Mary’s examples tell us Who she believed God to be.  Those who say we cannot know who God is (through our own experience, presumably) maybe should begin with Who Mary believed God to be, Who Jesus believed God to be, Who John the Evangelist believed God to be. 

The Quakers rejected religious authority in favor of each person seeking the Inner Light dwelling in each soul.  Their gatherings were an hour of silence, as each person sought the Lord within.  Only then would they begin to speak to one another.  I, too, have experienced this kind of gathering in the 70’s.  When we came together for our charismatic prayer meetings, we began with an hour of Eucharistic Adoration.  Only then would we have another hour of praise, thanksgiving, and faith-sharing, telling our stories to one another.

Only when people come together knowing what the Lord has done for them, as Mary and Elizabeth did, will we know God by His action in our lives.  Only then will we have a story to tell.  And when our common stories evolve upon a common theme, then we will know for sure the God Who has been with us from the beginning, the One Who promised that He would be with us to the end of the age.  Then our faith rests upon the rock of Truth.