"For Your Great Glory"

 How do we praise and thank God?

The Gloria says, “We thank you for your great glory.” What is the “glory” of God?

God’s glory is his greatness and goodness made manifest. We “glorify” God when we make obvious in ourselves or proclaim to others his Being, Truth, Goodness and Love. God is glorified in us (John 15:8, 17:10). And we glorify him when we praise him.

To praise we must appreciate. And to appreciate we must praise. Experience is only complete in expression. So what is the first step toward being able to “thank God for his great glory”?

Saint Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621, the first Jesuit Cardinal) explains in The Mind’s Ascent to God that we should use the “Ladder of Created Things.” There are fifteen steps. We won’t give them all![1]

Bellarmine first explains it is not contradictory to say that “God is not far from anyone of us, since in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27), but that nevertheless we are distant from him. God sees us, is in constant contact with us, holding us in being, and thinks about us continually. But we cannot see God, touch him, or hug him with affection. Worse, we cannot even think about him easily if we are all wrapped up in created things.

The solution is to unwrap the good things God has created and find him revealed in them. But for this we ourselves have to be unwrapped – detached, freed from the smothering embrace of those things that are holding us instead of being held, blocking our vision instead of opening insights into God. When our heart is free, our eyes can see.

Our “heart” is a combination of mind and will. To love is to know and choose. So, like a good Jesuit, Saint Robert suggests we begin by thinking. About ourselves.

Begin with the hand in front of your face. What explains it?

Evolution might explain how it got there, but nothing you see explains why it is there. Its “what it is” does not explain its “that it is.” So what is giving your hand existence?

This is the classic question about the “first cause.” Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The answer is “Neither, because there is nothing in either that could make it exist.” The first cause has to be something that needs nothing before itself; something that, if we could see it, we would see that it cannot not be. Something whose “what it is” explains its “that it is.” It is not the first in a series; it is something different from everything in the series. Something that doesn’t need a cause because there is no real difference between its “essence” (what it is) and its “existence” (that it is).

We cannot even imagine such a being, because an image requires a silhouette, a shape determined by boundaries. So do human thoughts. Our minds are made to understand particular beings, not Being Itself. Our thoughts are still-shots. Everything we know is framed; made clear and distinct by its structure, its boundaries, that “determine” (from terminus) its dimensions, its qualities, its “determining characteristics.” To “de-fine” something is to identify its fines or limits. We only know what something is by excluding what it isn’t.

But Being-as-Such has no framework, no structure. It is “in-finite,” without fines that “finish” or stop its existence at some point by restricting its dimensions. Its “determining characteristic” is to have no determining – that is “terminating” – characteristics. It is All that is, because its Being is to be Being Itself.

God is the Source of all being, but he has no source. His “what he is” is identical to his “that he is.” As God said, defining himself to Moses, “I AM WHO AM. Say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS, has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14).

That tells us everything and nothing. It tells us that God is, but unimaginable. So we get to know him by thinking about things we can understand, the things he has made. What they are has to come from God, so he must be what they are, only better. What God is giving them, God must have himself, only in greater measure. The Latin head-breaker for this is propter quod unumquodque et illud magis. If you can translate that, give yourself a star!

To be precise, God is not “better” or “greater,” as one in a series. God is hors de série, above and beyond all comparisons. When we use the same word to describe creatures and God we mean they are “analogously” the same. They are same enough to justify using the same word, but too different for the word to have exactly the same meaning in both. We just have to keep this in mind.

So if we want to “thank God for his great glory,” we have to see how his wisdom, goodness and love are revealed in the things and people he has made. The best way to get to know God is to get to know ourselves. Not just superficially, but in depth.

This is more than knowing how we function. We know that through biology and psychology, through chemistry and physics. We go “beyond physics” and technology – the study of how things work – when we go into “metaphysics,” the study of what things are. Metaphysics is the study of being.

To know God personally – as he is in himself – instead of just” professionally, as “Architect of the Universe,” we have to compare our being with his Being, what we are in ourselves with what God is in himself.

This starts us up the “Ladder of Created Things” to begin our Mind’s Ascent to God.

Stay tuned for our next thrilling episode of praising and thanking God for his great glory.

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[1] Republished by Paulist Press, 1989. In quoting, I have freely rearranged texts and paraphrased.

Praying with Thanksgiving

We celebrate Thanksgiving one day every year to remind us what we really want to do all year long. We can have a mystical experience every time we thank God if we know what we are doing.  A “mystical experience” is a conscious awareness of relationship (interaction) with the divine.

Here’s how it works:

Imagine you are in an artist’s house admiring a statue she made. Imagine yourself praising her for it. You experience a bond of common appreciation. Praise makes your relatedness conscious.

Now imagine her telling you that she carved this statue precisely for you, to give it to you as a gift. What do you feel now? Does that add something to the experience? Make you aware of something more in your relationship? Add another bond?

Now admiration and praise have been extended into gratitude.

When we admire God’s work in the world, it is not like something we see exposed in a museum or decorating another person’s house. This could evoke admiration and praise, but not gratitude. When we realize, however, that everything around us, all that we see and hear and taste and feel and experience, was created and is being sustained in existence by God right now precisely for us, then we can move to thanksgiving.

With thanksgiving we enter into another area of truth, another level of mystery. This Person who created all we see around us created it for us. It is all gift. Recognizing this brings us into another kind of relationship with God.

Thanksgiving bonds us to God in love.

But we have to thank him. Just as praise turns admiration into personal relationship, expressing thanks turns gratitude into bonding. That is why we need to thank God explicitly. Thanksgiving is what makes gratitude conscious and real. Thanksgiving makes gratitude an experience. If we understand intellectually that everything on earth is God’s gift to us but do not personally thank him for it, we are not accepting or acknowledging the gift — not as gift.

And we won’t appreciate God as Giver.

We may use all that is provided for us, and be glad we have it. But if we do not personally and explicitly thank God for it, we will not experience what we enjoy as the gift that it is. And we will not experience relationship with God as Giver. We will not have the mystical experience of accepting and returning his love.

Nothing excites love so much as being loved. When we realize the love with which God has delightedly designed the universe for us, proliferating plants and flowers, spreading the stars throughout the sky, tripling to trillions the tastes and colors, sounds, sensations and varieties of pleasure available to us on every level of body and soul, how can we fail to love him back?

But we will not realize we are loved unless we thank God for loving us. We will not realize how and how much we are loved unless we thank him in detail, noticing the shades and nuances and delicacy of his love in the multitude of gifts he is lavishing upon us. Thanksgiving introduces us into the mystery of the multiple manifestations of God’s love. This is a mystical experience.

When we “give thanks” for the meal in front of us, we should go into detail, at least in our minds.

“Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this food to eat….”

Look at it. Look at what is on the plate. How many different shapes and colors and textures and tastes! How many different kinds of food. How many people combined to produce it.

“Fruit of the earth, and the work of human hands….”

And of divine hands. Hands overflowing with generosity. God didn’t have to feed us with such variety, such richness, such a multiplicity of foods.

He could have made us to live on beans alone.

But he didn’t. That is the marvel and mystery of his love — which we enter into and appreciate by thanking him for it.

A “mystery” is not something unknowable. A mystery is “that which invites endless exploration.” That is what the mystery of God’s love is: love expressed in an inexhaustible series of surprises, experienced in an endless unearthing of benevolence.

By thanking God for his love we experience love. Love for God, love for each other, universal love.

We come to appreciate the meaning of the greeting at Mass: “May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God… be with you!”

This is the mystical experience that is the fruit of thanksgiving.

Get Real: Pray the Mass

I read escapist novels – like fairy tales and westerns – to escape. Duh. But how does it happen?

The story puts me into a different world. An unreal one, where death is comic-book death, where there are superhuman helpers, and the good guy always wins. I can get out of the real world for awhile, lose myself in a different one. Escape.

It dawned on me: this is what Mass is, except the unreal world we get into there is the real one.

This world is true and false reality. The ground is solid under my feet – as long as God keeps willing it into existence. Of itself it is nothingness. So are other people. So am I.

My relationship with others, no matter how deep, still doesn’t reach the core of their being. I don’t know any of them as they really are. Nor do I know myself.

I feel alive. I am alive – tentatively. But what feels like life has already ended in death, if I include the future. I am more “living” than “alive.” It is a passing condition.

Things give me pleasure. I think of it as happiness. Money and health make me feel secure. Approval and success make me feel I am worth something. Sirach said it like it is: “Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity!”

Now let’s go to Mass.

From the moment we enter church we are in a different world. God’s world. What is real is God: Father, Son and Spirit. What is real about us is that we share in the divine life of God (the “grace of the Lord Jesus Christ”). We are forever. We are divine. That is reality.

At Mass our conscious connection with others is the mystery of “communion in the Holy Spirit.” It is not sociological Catholicism. We are one as the Father, Son and Spirit are one (John 17:11-21). That is a mystery. But it is reality. One that will last forever.

We praise God, calling to mind who he is: “For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High!” That restores perspective. That is reality.

We listen to God’s words read at Mass. They clash with the words of the culture, the words we see and hear all day. But God’s words are true. They are reality.

Jesus Christ becomes present in the act of offering himself on the cross. It is a “real presence.” Calvary is present to us. We are present on Calvary. We are united to Jesus, participating in his act of sacrifice. That is reality. It is the reality of our lives. .

At Baptism we “presented our bodies as a living sacrifice to God.” We were incorporated into Christ’s body on the cross, died in Christ and rose to be his living body on earth (Romans 6:3-4; 12:12). The truth about our being is that we “were buried with Christ in baptism, and were also raised with him” and “seated with him in the heavenly places” (Colossians 2:12; Ephesians 2:6). That is what we celebrate at Mass. That is reality.

We were “reborn,” “raised with Christ” out of the “womb tomb” of Baptism, so that we might “walk in newness of life.”

“So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Colossians 3:1). That is reality.

At Communion time we enter in preview into the “wedding banquet of the Lamb.” Christ the “Bread of heaven” has entered visibly into each one. For a brief moment all divisions are forgotten, all resentments put aside, all offenses forgiven. We are one as we will be in heaven – and, in the eternal “now” of God, already are. That is reality.

Now “the Mass is ended. You are sent forth.”  We are sent back into the “real” world of shadow permanence, of wavering focus, false perceptions and phony promises. The world which lures us to forget who we are.

But we are sent back to remember. And to proclaim. We go out to bring the whole world into reality, into the celebration that lets us “escape” into the world that is real.

We “Go in peace.”