Praising God

Praising God is a staple of Christian worship. In the various Pentecostal churches I’ve visited, I’ve found that people are more likely to greet you by saying “Praise the Lord” than by simply saying “hello.” In churches where higher levels of congregational exuberance are the norm, it’s not uncommon for people to call out “Hallelujah” or “Praise the Lord” during the sermons and to have bands spending a lot of time on praise songs (“Our God is an Awesome God”). Episcopalians are more sedate, but every Sunday mass has a song of praise at the beginning (though my parish tends toward more traditional music). “Glory to you, beholding the depths; in the high vault of heaven, glory to you,” we sing.

Mormons don’t have a period of worship services set aside for praise, but praise of God runs through hymns and prayers and lessons,  though I think the Mormon style is less likely to take the form of “God is amazing” and more likely to show up in expressions of gratitude. Growing up in the LDS church, I certainly absorbed the message that God expected us to praise him, though perhaps not in the excited way that evangelicals did. The God I learned about wanted praise and worship to be reverent. But he did want to be praised.

Honestly, even as a kid I thought this was weird. It is not seen as an admirable quality in humans to be overly concerned with receiving adulation. What is up with a deity who demands that people constantly praise him? Why is it seen as hubris and pride for humans to trumpet all the praiseworthy things they’ve done and expect cheering crowds, but it’s okay for God to have that expectation? And even more than an expectation—it’s sometimes framed as a flat-out command. But a God who orders people to praise him regardless of how awful their lives are under his rule feels not very different from an authoritarian dictator.

I think this is one reason I have struggled to emotionally connect with the praise aspect of worship. Another reason is that the God I grew up believing in was often, not to put too fine a point on it, a real jerk. What he cared about, above all, was being obeyed. He was not all interested in the particularity of my (or anyone’s) experience. When I questioned aspects of the church that made me utterly miserable, for example, the answer I heard most often was that God wanted things to be that way, and that was that. Your personal needs and wants were irrelevant. The point of life was to do what God told you to do. I may have gone along with this at times, but it is not a worldview that inspires authentic praise of the divine.

My religious experience was not monochromatic, of course. Sometimes I glimpsed something different. Sometimes I felt love. Sometimes I wondered if God wasn’t actually an awful tyrant who couldn’t wait to unleash vengeance. But that seemed too good to be true, and when I let myself momentarily consider it as a real possibility, I would remember the contempt in people’s voices when they talked about churches that were too warm and fuzzy in their view of God, that didn’t know that God had very high standards, and I would be ashamed of my lapse, of my desire to believe in a nice, easy Jesus. God doesn’t look upon sin with the least degree of allowance, after all. As an adolescent, I think on a deep level I believed that the most terrible thing you could do was fall into the complacency of believing in a God who was too loving and forgiving. God had no patience for that, and would set you straight as soon as possible.

As you might imagine after reading this delightful view of God, I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy sorting through these beliefs. Believing in God has always been in my DNA; for whatever reason, I can’t escape it. Believing that God is good (and I don’t mean “good” in a mysterious way that will only become clear in the next life, but “good” in a way that humans can recognize as good) has been a long journey, and required some serious leaps of faith at times. And while I do feel like my spiritual life has become more peaceful over the years, more a source of nourishment than of terror and guilt, sometimes it’s startling to realize just how much baggage I still carry. My sister and I were talking the other day about a hymn that I adore, “Love Divine All Loves Excelling.” She noted that the same tune is in the LDS hymnbook as “In Humility Our Savior.” And I flinched and said, “ugh, I hate that song.” Then I had to stop and think about why. And I realized: I have a deeply negative visceral reaction to all the LDS sacrament hymns. Because the sacrament was a horrible experience for me. It was a weekly time to reflect on how much I’d disappointed God, how I wasn’t worthy, how my bad choices had made Jesus suffer. Since those weren’t particularly inviting subjects to contemplate, a lot of times I didn’t think about anything related to religion during the sacrament, and then I felt guilty about that. (Contemplating this is making me feel queasy enough that I can see I’ve still got some stuff to work through. More fun for my therapist!)

At a time when I was struggling with how best to counter the anti-gay messages I’d spent my life internalizing, my then-therapist suggested that I spend as much time as possible in affirming spaces. I’ve thought about that approach more generally as a way to counter toxic messages. You can’t argue yourself out of them, because they’re not based on rationality in the first place. But you can seek out environments that will feed you more nourishing ideas. I go to church now and regularly encounter a God who is genuinely about love, who wants to be in relationship with us and is not easily scared off by our failings, who calls us to be better versions of ourselves and do good in the world but also radically accepts us where we are without judgment or condemnation. And I feel like hearing about this again and again has slowly chipped away at my image of God as angry and tyrannical and mostly focused on where humans are falling short of his high standards. (Having this experience regularly is probably the biggest reason why I fell in love with the Episcopal church, but I would note that I’m not saying it’s the only place to find this, and that I really do believe that some people encounter it in Mormonism. As I continue to work through a lot of feelings about my experiences growing up LDS, I do want to hold space for the incredible complexity and diversity of religious experience.)

But back to this issue of praise. Even as I’ve felt more connection to a life-giving God, it’s been rare for me really emotionally connect to all this praise and glorifying God that’s part of worship. I mean, I’m barely beginning to trust God; I’m not up for saying lots of stuff about how amazing s/he is. But I do feel like I had a moment two years ago where I briefly got it. I’ve written before about the transformative experience I had when I was baptized in the Episcopal faith. Part of that involved a sense of something I struggle to put language to—the phrase that comes to mind is “being saved,” but that phrase has a lot of baggage in our culture that makes me reluctant to use it. But I felt like something happened, something that mattered. And I was seriously amazed by it. And really for the first time in my life, I understood why people might want to shout acclamations, might want to express their awe and delight at God’s goodness and saving work. I actually got it.

Of course, it was just a moment, and my life has gone on, and I can’t say that a sense of wanting to praise God has become a regular thing. But I do at least remember how it felt. I am on a retreat this weekend, staying at a cozy little hermitage at a Catholic college, and savoring the sense of peace I feel here. I’m probably not going to jump and up and down and say “Hallelujah, praise the Lord!” But with the two-year anniversary of my baptism coming up on Tuesday, I’ve been reflecting on the religious experiences I’ve had the last few years, and how much this journey has meant to me. And I feel the way I do when I read a poem that hits me in all the right places, or go for a hike on a beautiful day: wonder at the goodness in the world, despite everything. Wonder at the amazing grace that keeps finding its way to a wretch like me.