Songs of Absurdity

by Thomas Howard - August 4, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

To worship God at all is to find oneself on a very odd frontier. Here we are, addressing all sorts of fervid sentiments into the ether – or so it might seem to a chance observer. A passerby might ask, "To whom are you talking, pray? God? But you have never once seen him nor heard his voice. Nor has anyone else, for that matter. What makes you think that what you are doing isn't merely whistling in the dark?"

Well, we and everyone from Adam, Noah, and Abraham on down – all tribes and cultures – have always done this. It belongs to our humanity. That God is, and that He hears us and loves us and is worthy of our praise – all of this seems to be inscribed in our very being.

But, our inquirer might object, can't you hear the absurd claims you make when you worship? Take, for example, that song that the Virgin sang, and which you have picked up and made a staple of your own praises. How do you relate all of that to what seems obvious if only one takes the trouble to look around at how the world just forges on its grim way?

What about, "He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts"? Can that be said about the Virgin's world – or ours? It always looks as though the proud rule the roost. Heads of state, chairmen of boards, tenured professors, financiers, pundits, authors – how many of these are to be found among the meek and humble of the earth? Has God scattered them?

Or again, "He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich He hath sent away empty." Take a look at the world, man. Are you talking fantasy?

Or there is that staggering canticle, chanted in the Church for centuries, sung by Daniel's three young friends in Nebuchadnezzar's furnace. It sounds particularly far-fetched. It summons the Sun, Moon, and Stars with, "Bless ye the Lord: praise Him and magnify Him forever." But we all know that those orbs have no intelligence, much less mouths to sing with. What sort of a cosmology is this?

And it proceeds to even greater absurdities, calling upon Winter and Summer to praise God. No one supposes, surely, that there is an entity "Winter" that can join in lauding this God of yours? Not to mention Light and Darkness, Fire and Heat, and Dews and Frosts. Not to mention Whales. You call to them all, "Bless ye the Lord: praise Him and magnify Him forever." What is in your mind when you descant this way?

For a reply, of course, we have to recur to the plodding notion of Faith.

Faiths pierces the scrim of appearances and rests its gaze on the reality that has been unveiled for us in the Incarnation of the Word, and in His life, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. This is the everlasting drama that arches over our mutability – the mere rise and fall of empires, and the evanescence of philosophies and fashions, and the contingencies and sufferings of our individual experience.

But to lay hold of all of this is a tall order for faith. Appearances hail us unremittingly. Sheer circumstances, for example: For most of us they are far from triumphant, or even noteworthy. And for many of us mortals, circumstances are grim: sickness, bereavement, failure, poverty, debility. And yet, like the Virgin, we keep on saying that God has blessed us lavishly.

Obviously what we say draws upon what we (Christians) see, which is precisely the unseen. No one now can see Christ risen from the dead, much less ascended into heaven and sitting at the right hand of God. None of this will yield itself to any poll, research, or telescope. It is all foolishness, as St. Paul observed about the preaching of the gospel.

But Christian faith exults in it all. It says that God has raised us with Christ and made us sit in heavenly places (Paul again). It sees death as already conquered, and it sees a creation where indeed the dews and frosts and nights and days and the whales do, in a mystery, join us mortals and the angels in lauding the Most High. How do they do it? We have no way of grasping it yet. But depend upon it: In a sense that eludes us so far, the whole creation does, in fact, praise God. We mortals do so with words and voices and liturgy, and in some sense it is our praises that articulate and "lead" the praises of creation. The mute creation has other modes (merely by being the exquisite things that they are?), and when all things are made clear at the Last Day, we will perhaps discover what those other modes have been.

Meanwhile, we address the Most High with language that outstrips mere common sense and plain observation and rests on the bedrock of faith.

Thomas Howard is retired from 40 years of teaching English in private schools, college, and seminary in England and America.