Sunday School Answers

When my Sunday school teacher started class, it hadn’t occurred to me that part of my experience would entail a moment of nostalgia. The teacher asked if any one had prayer requests, and the first person to answer was a man replying, “I don’t have a request, but I do have a praise.” At that, what at first felt like an ordinary class beginning shifted for me into a memory flashback.

You have to step into my shoes to understand how odd this seemed. I hadn’t attended Sunday school since childhood, and hearing “praise” used in that sense brought back images of restless children raising their hands, ready to divulge all the kindnesses God had bestowed upon the family cat.

I want to talk about what this man said. But first, it’s important to make a tedious distinction between what someone says and what they mean. When someone says they wish to offer a praise, very rarely do they mean praise as such. They mean more to give thanks, or to be specific, they mean to combine thanks and praise, to be grateful toward the acts of a powerful and benevolent God. Strictly, praise is an act of adoration absent from any provocation other than cognitive recognition of who someone is. When a husband tells his wife she is beautiful, he is praising a property, not an action. On the other hand, gratitude, strictly speaking, is a stimulus/response act toward someone specifically as a result of receiving something.

I make this tedious distinction only to establish more clearly the possibility for the communication of its contraposition, the combination of meanings, or what might be called vagueness.

I want to talk of praise like the man in Sunday school talked of praise. I am not, in other words, concerned with praise strictly speaking, or thankfulness strictly speaking. Philosophers are always nitpicky about saying exactly what they mean, and you will find me sympathetic to them even here. Our only difference at present lies in that where they usually prefer to narrow words I prefer to broaden them. Mark that I still obey my philosophers by saying exactly what I mean, only notice that what I mean tends toward being vague. As will be clear momentarily, this is not a contradiction in terms. For the moment, I merely want to point out that there is value (it is the poets value) to being vague. And this value, insofar as I speak to it, exists within the psychological sphere.

For in truth, half-meanings and immature formulations constitute the majority of our day to day conversation. To use praise in the broader sense is to include all that psychology which partakes of time and events. The prayer of praise in that classroom did not originally have the same meaning it does now. Words gain or lose meaning from the time they are spoken until they are extinguished from the memories of speaker and audience. As it happens, the more potent the word, the longer it’s tenure in our memories, and more importantly, the more time that word has to mature within our minds. This, by the way, is why the gospel must come primarily through the foolishness of preaching. If a word hooks into the psyche, it evolves with veracity, eventually attaching itself to every thought.

The subject of praise often strikes a nerve in me, and I suspect that my distant, abstract treatment of it thus far somewhat demonstrates my feelings toward it. I care nothing for platitudinous gratitude or praise, in their strict sense, and cringe when I find someone inserting one liners into their prayers in attempts to enrich a conspicuously barren spiritual life. I speak of those moments when men and women pray to an audience and not to a Creator.

But praise in the sense of Sunday school dodges these sorts of criticism primarily because of its naivety. It does not know that it does not know what it means, and is, moreover, unconcerned with people’s opinion. It is too excited by the mere fact of God’s interaction, too enthusiastic to bother with details. I both agree with this sentiment and wish to ascribe myself to it. As an involuntary emotional response, it shows right orderedness within the soul. Properly, man ought to feel praise toward his God.

I only treat the details here because I have a need to make sense of the psychological process. I want to know why the Sunday school definition of praise seems intuitively valuable to Sunday schoolers, including myself. The reason, I take it, is quite simple, though hard to articulate simply. In the moment of praising, any number of mental processes ignite. Belief in an omnipotent God couples with gratitude over, say, a much needed car, and suddenly the happy impulse leaks through all our inhibitions, unfettered and reckless. The reciprocal smiles and head-nods accompanying the story which follow are likewise the result of the same mental process in others, the same coupling of the Divine and the material.

For these reasons and many more, I believe it a sin to stymie praise, to inhibit feeling wonder and gratitude, to whatever degree, at the kindnesses given us. I don’t merely mean that the problem lies with failing to communicate God’s goodness to others. As is my way, I mean something more intimately psychological. I have heard too many people say “I’m just waiting for things to fall apart.” The idea is one of resisting the enrapturing presence goodness in order to be prepared for the inevitable. Truly, if life seasons act at all like the harvest seasons, pleasantries are guaranteed to diminish. Winter is on the way. But it is the essential condition of happiness to be happy. I say this not to promote naivety on our part. To the contrary, I insist we think properly about praise. The rejection of complete happiness is, in the moments it comes, the rejection of a God given grace. I am of the opinion that our feelings are good things when they are employed properly. To adulterate the moment with fear or with anything negative is not to have the genuine moment. But man, or at least some men, I think, are meant to have such moments. Defense mechanisms of this sort halt the movement of grace, deprive of us a good, and thus keep us ignorant of the full nature of God’s kindness. The rejection of grace, in other words, is a rejection of knowing God’s interaction, and, by implication, His character. How, in those days of anguish, are we to combat the darkness of our thoughts when we have never fully seen what it is to be in the light?

But I did not write on praise with this level of detail to reprimand; I wrote all this as a segway for praising, indeed, as a formulation of praise.

A year ago this time, I had been suffering depression for near 2 years. A year ago this time, I was tossing cold, deformed bread in a basket. A year ago this time, I had no idea why I was alone, where I was going, or when things were going to change. Funny enough, all that jabber in my childhood Sunday school classes sustained me through the darkest days. “Remain faithful”, my teachers would say, “and in His right timing you will run and not be weary, walk and not faint.”

The foolishness of preaching, indeed. I cannot recount, mostly because I cannot count, the graces bestowed on me these past few months. I am indeed full of gratitude. I am likewise cognizant of God’s greatness. But what I prefer to say is the Sunday school thing, “I don’t have a request, but I do have a praise.”