A prayer of praise for the days nothing invites it

Some prayers you can say without thinking. Asking is one: the moment a need appears, the words arrive on their own. Thanking has to be learned, but it is learned quickly. Praise is not. We keep putting it off, and we put it off on one precise condition: the day we feel like it.

That day does not come often. What comes is a run of decent days where nothing overflows, and where praising sounds like an enthusiasm you do not have.

It is not a thank you

The confusion is worth undoing, because it explains the waiting.

A prayer of gratitude has an object, and that object is yours: what was given, what held, what was avoided. It goes through an inventory. That is its strength, and also its limit. On days when the inventory is thin, or spoiled by one piece of bad news, it has no material left, and it shows.

A prayer of praise does not speak about what you received. It speaks about the one you are addressing. The object is no longer inside your day.

A simple test, worth doing once. Write two lines: one beginning “Thank you for”, one beginning “You are”. Watch which comes by itself and which resists. For most people the first is written in ten seconds and the second hangs there, because you are still hunting for a reason to put after it.

There is no reason to put after it. That is exactly the point.

Two grounds in one verse

Psalm 150 is the last in the book. Six verses, ten imperatives of praise, and not one request. Its second verse gives praise two grounds, side by side, and they are not the same kind of thing.

Praise him for his mighty acts. Praise him according to his excellent greatness.

Psalm 150:2 (World English Bible)

The first ground is a tally: mighty acts, things done, therefore things you can count and can fail to find. The second is not a tally. “According to his excellent greatness” points to no event, recent or ancient. Nothing in your week can confirm it, and nothing in your week can refute it.

The verse leaves a door open for the days when the first half yields nothing. That is the door praise goes through when the day has been flat.

And the psalm ends on the lowest threshold there is.

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.

Psalm 150:6 (World English Bible)

Not those who have something to show. Those who are breathing.

Habakkuk, and the sentence English will not let you finish

There is a passage in Scripture that does the exact thing at issue here, and it opens with a list of losses.

For though the fig tree doesn’t flourish, nor fruit be in the vines; the labor of the olive fails, the fields yield no food; the flocks are cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls:

Habakkuk 3:17 (World English Bible)

Six clauses, six things missing. Nothing softened, nothing hedged, and the inventory complete before a word of praise is spoken. Then the next verse.

yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will be joyful in the God of my salvation.

Habakkuk 3:18 (World English Bible)

Everything turns on “yet”. It does not correct the list, cancel it, or suggest it was overstated. The list stands, entire. The praise comes and rests on something else.

English does one thing here that French cannot. Look at how verse 17 ends: on a colon, and on “though”. The losses are a subordinate clause, and the sentence is not finished until “yet I will rejoice” arrives. You cannot read the English list on its own, because the grammar is already carrying you past it. The French closes verse 17 with a full stop and begins a new sentence: the French reader can sit in the losses with no rescue in view, and has to wait for the next verse to be given one.

The French gains something in return, at the verb. Segond writes “je veux me réjouir”, I want to rejoice, and writes it twice. That is not a report of joy already present. It is a decision taken in its absence, and English says it more quietly.

A prayer of praise to say today

Here is a prayer written for this page. It assumes neither a good day nor an impulse.

Lord, I am not here to tell you what I received. Today there is not much to count, and what I counted yesterday did not hold. I want to tell you what you are, without going through my day. You were there before I got up, you will be there when I have forgotten everything, and nothing that is missing from me makes you any less. I say it without feeling it, because it is true before it is felt. You are great, and that does not depend on me.

Notice what it does not do. It hunts for no reason, thanks for nothing, asks for nothing. The only sentences with “I” in them are sentences of withdrawal: I am not here to tell, there is not much to count, I say it without feeling it. What is left standing at the end is not a feeling. It is a sentence.

If you would rather have a received text than a written one, the Glory Be does the same thing in three lines, and has been doing it far longer.

The ones who praised with nothing to praise for

The longest poem of praise in the English language was written line by line by a man shut away for seven years as a madman, with a cat for his only company. Christopher Smart gives a long passage of it to that animal, seriously, without irony.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.

Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, Fragment B, ll. 695-696

He had nothing to praise for. He had a cat, a window, and the habit of looking at what was in front of him. Praise did not wait for his circumstances to improve, and his circumstances never did.

Fanny Crosby, blind from the age of six weeks, wrote more than eight thousand hymns. Late in her life she wrote:

It seemed intended by the blessed Providence of God, that I should be blind all my life; and I thank Him for the dispensation.

Fanny Crosby, Fanny Crosby’s Life-Story, ch. I, 1903

One caution matters here. Those two sentences are facts, not instructions. Nobody owes thanks for what damages them, and there is no holiness in affliction as such. What these two lives show is smaller and more useful: praise did not need the circumstances to turn, and it found room precisely where something was missing.

What you can do tonight

Take Habakkuk’s structure, in order.

First the list. Write down what is wrong, honestly, without arranging it and without putting it in perspective. As many lines as it takes. This is the part piety skips, and it is why so much praise rings hollow.

Then, underneath, write the word “yet”. On its own line.

Then one sentence after it, only one, that is not about you. Not about what you hope for, not about what you expect it to become. Something that would still be true if the list above never moved.

You do not have to feel anything while writing it. It is a decision, as it was for the prophet, and it gets taken twice rather than once.

If what you are missing is the shape of prayer as a whole rather than this one piece of it, the page on Christian prayer starts from the beginning.