Canter Bridge

The crescendo is a central feature of biblical praise. The dynamic of adoration is such that increasing numbers of worshippers become caught up in its centering force.

Yet if it centers—by this I mean that it fixes the creature’s gaze on what is most true about the created whole of which he is a member—it also de-centers, for its force flows outward. Almost by definition, praise is a centrifugal force, its contagious potency captivating ever larger circles in its noisy work.

When the psalmist has exhausted his description of praise as it can be offered by the human community, a recurring reflex has him reach out into the non-human world. He personifies what might previously have been considered inert, non-doxological nature:

Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
the world and those who live in it.
Let the floods clap their hands;
let the hills sing together for joy! (Psalm 97:7-8)

It would be wrong to read this rigidly, literalistically, with that peculiar bent for reification that attaches itself to the seriousness with which believing people read the Bible. Yet it would be far more misguided to miss the psalmist’s point about the largeness of the praising circle.

Indeed there is something benevolently totalitarian about the practice of praising the world’s Creator. It is not complete until all have joined in its song. The euphoria of praise bears with it a certain sadness in the present age, for the dancing, singing, worshipping community is aware that all do not yet recognize that the central truth about Creator and creation is that the former is to be praised by the latter.

Coercion does not drive this truth on its way. Rather it is powered by the acuity that comes to those who join their voices to the song, their bodies to the dance. YHWH is, as the psalm two before this one is traditionally rendered, greatly to be praised.

The thing is just that way.

The apostle Paul is, similarly, deeply doxological in his understanding of creation, redemption, and its divine Practitioner. He knows in his bones that all true thinking, all right speaking leads inexorably to doxology. For Paul, there is no imposed force in this. As with the psalmist, he seems simply to understand that the world is that way. Those who see it well, those whose lens is not distorted by refracting smudges, know it to be true and the truest thing.

Paul knows the sadness, too. A strain of melancholy that respects the fact that not all praise this way leads him to speak of creation ‘groaning’ as it awaits its full, cataclysmic redemption.

Yet he is sure, as is the poet who stands behind the ninety-eighth psalm, that this sad restraint will not always hold back humanity’s song and the doxological explosion that is the birthright of all creation. One day, he knows, even the floods will clap their hands. Even hills will sing together for joy.