Christianity teaches its adherents to praise God. But does God even need our praise? The Creator of all things visible and invisible requires the fawning adoration of one species in a universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of hundreds of billions of stars? What's all that about?
Our fragile egos need praise. Narcissists - they thrive on it. Just look at Trump playing to his admiring audiences. And religions project that very human behavioural trait, that cognitive bias, that if powerful men require praise, so does God. An understandable mistake to make if you consider God to be anthropomorphic. But in the incomprehensible vastness of the Cosmos, this is just plain wrong.
"Praise be to God" as a spontaneous exclamation when the outcome of some stochastic process happens to go in our favour suggest that 'praise' and 'thanks' may be interchangeable. But gratitude is more important than praise. To whom are we thankful? God the Reason, God the Purpose, God the Destination. You either intuit God or you don't; God cannot be proved or disproved objectively - subjectively, however, you just know.
The opposite of gratitude is often not an outright manifestation of ingratitude, but the result of complacency, forgetfulness and lack of empathy. Someone does us a good turn, and we overlook it, forget to say 'thank you'. Does this count as a slap in the face of our benefactor? Only if the benefactor has a fragile ego and takes it that way, taking umbrage ore even bearing a grudge about it. But even if our benefactor isn't ego-focused, and discounts our forgetfulness as just that - one thing's certain - don't count on that good turn being repeated.
So it is with luck. Just a conscious, heartfelt, thought of gratitude to God the Reason (etc see above) whenever you suddenly become aware of your good fortune is all it takes. We walk upon the edge of chaos each day; gratitude and awareness can ward off misfortune. Stay conscious!
A final thought - imagine waking up one morning to the feeling "Hey! I'm healthy! Nothing bothers me today! That's great! Should I feel grateful? NAH! That's just the way things go! A randomly generated euphoric state, that's all it is!" That, I posit, would be enough to upset God... The word 'ignorant' has strayed from its original meaning - someone who ignores. Ignore not intuitions of gratitude; ponder them, live them.
This time last year:
Too busy running around and making cider!
[Sadly none this year - trees bore no fruit.]
All together, saving our planet
This time five years ago:
W-wa Zachodnia Platform 8 to reopen
This time six years ago:
Learning to fly (swan pics)
This time eight years ago:
Scotland's answer to the Hoover Building
This time ten years ago:
In which I don't vote in the mayoral referendum, thus helping to save HG-W's job
This time 11 years ago:
Gorgeous cars from Czechoslovakia
This time 12 years ago:
Donald Tusk and Co. get re-elected
This time 13 years ago:
Poland's wonderful bread
This time 14 years ago:
An October Friday in Warsaw
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2 comments:
As is often the case, the point where two languages meet and don’t quite mesh is where semantic revelations lurk. I was reminded of my own battles with the meanings of practically every English word ages ago, and of your post earlier this week, when an insightful student today asked me what was wrong with the verb ‘to praise’. Each time she wanted to use it – she said – it sounded false, an in this sentence: “My boss praised my presentation to the shareholders today”. Polish differentiates the fawning or worshiping act from that of approval by adding a prefix: “chwalić” and “pochwalić”, making one imperfective and the other perfective (sort of). In English, we may well have two different words: praise and compliment, the latter having Poles instantly reach for different associations. I like Johnson’s wit, who stands somewhere in between, explaining that complimenting is an act of expression of civility, usually understood to include some hypocrisy, and to mean less than it declares.
@ Jacek Koba
Always great to have your comments on my blog! Excellent observations as ever.
If you turn 'chwalić' into a reflexive verb by adding 'się', and we have 'to boast' ("On się chwalił, że dostał największą podwyżkę w całym zespole" - "He boasted that he'd got the highest pay-rise in the whole team"). No one likes the boastful, Poles in particular. Hubris is due to the boastful.
As to Johnson, an adjective, frequently misused, that is associated with the word 'praise' is 'fulsome'
* Offensive to good taste, tactless, overzealous, excessive.
* Excessively flattering (connoting insincerity).
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