Benedictine Morning Prayers

"O God open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise."

It's from the Psalms, but it's used as the opening line for morning prayer in a Benedictine prayerbook I have and occassionally employ (not that the latter is any of your business.  This is not that kind of post. I am, if anything, a more whited sepulchre than you will ever be!  There; my piety bona fides are established.  Move along.).  It interests me only as a phrase, right now; because lately my mind sticks (could be the beginning of lectio divino?  NO!  We're not going there!  Not here! Down, boy!)...my mind sticks on it.  The idea, the physical idea:  may God open my lips, and (then?) my mouth will declare your praise.

Now, to begin at the end, I have no problem with praising God.  As a theological concept, I mean.  Praising God is not abasement before a higher power seeking its beneficence.  Praising God is an act of proper humility. I know humility runs against the modern American grain (especially), but humility is the core of Christianity (or should be, IMHTO).  So praising God is not an act of self=abnegation or abdication or ego-stroking the "Man Upstairs."  Praising God is like prayer:  its for us; not for God.

It seems to me all criticism of prayer or praise founders on this point:  it takes human need out of consideration.  It is assumed humans don't need God (or prayer, therefore) and certainly don't need to praise God.  Well, I wouldn't say it is a function equivalent to the need for food, shelter, and clothing.  Then again the "hierarchy of need" is terribly reductionist and foolishly positivist (it feigns empricism, but it's real focus is positivism).  The cave paintings in France, the rock art in South Texas, indicate that cultures we would hardly describe as meeting our expectations of "need" on the hierarchy of same, found shade under rocks, or burrowed underground where paintings would be undisturbed by the elements or other humans, in order to make art.  Why?  It doesn't feed, shelter, or clothe one.  Yet, there it is:  as essential (at least) as those.  If the "hierarchy of needs" neglects matters artistic (why do we make music?  tell stories?  write and recite poems?  Paint?  sculpt? photograph?), it just as surely neglects matters spiritual (why is religion so ubiquitous in human culture?  And why, after a century of medicine and technology and standards of living that would beggar kings and princes of only a few centuries ago, are we still so spiritually empty and bereft, so unhappy in the world we've made?  Indeed, the default setting soon after adolescence seems to be that everything sucks and our world is a ruin and a wasteland, and despair is the only accepted response; joy and exuberance just mean you don't understand reality.  (Yes, Trump preaches something like this, but he does so to promise restoration; and because he really doesn't understand reality.).  If there is a true 'hierarchy of needs' that doesn't understand the need for non-material matters (love; friendship, joy, matters of spirit however you wish to define/demarcate them), is it really considering all human needs?  Or just the ones we ascribe to the animals (who more and more are found, as we finally look, to be as relational and communal and "human" as we.  We long ago domesticated dogs and cats, and many other domesticated animals as well express love and joy,  Why have the dogs and cats, especially, not gone back, thrown off the yoke of human companionship, returned to the "wild"?  I don't ask for a conclusive answer; I just ask to raise the question.) But is it right to call animals "animals," meaning something less than, and less valuable or worthy than, humans?

Why?

Do dogs and cats love us because we love them?  Or do they not love at all, and it's just a human illusion?  I don't have an answer, but I don't think it's just a matter of "needs" on their part.  I find, from my experience, that's a very reductionist answer.  It squeezes too much out and casts it aside as unimportant. Do I need my cat to praise me?  No.  But I need to acknowledge the importance of my cat, so I don't treat it like a piece of paper I've used and throw away, or a piece of furniture I've decided to replace for my own convenience.  Do I need to praise God?  In the sense of "needs," no.  In the sense of spiritual well-being, I need to acknowledge my position before God.  And give thanks, to the Creator.  It puts things in perspective, if I do.

This is not about praising God for my comfortable life.  Materially, my life is comfortable, but by American standards it has not always been so.  Nothing I've done as an adult has lead to a comfortable and secure end.  I'm benefiting now, in my retirement, not from what I did, but from the wealth (such as it is by American standards) my father left me.  My life was a series of failures, not successes.  I say that honestly, not despairingly.  God did not provide me the life the "Gospel of Wealth" preachers preach (and the irony of that phrase, used first by Andrew Carnegie to establish some social responsibility by the robber barons for the wealth they accumulated from the masses, the individuals who make up society.  He meant to return that money to society, and he did.  Preachers today mean to accumulate wealth; for themselves first, and for their followers, who funnel that wealth to the preachers. It's grotesque.)  This isn't about me, and you don't need to know the sordid details of my life.  But to the extent God blessed me, or was with me, it wasn't to make life easy, or to make me succeed in spite of myself.  I don't believe that childish nonsense that basically teaches believers are adolescents and God is the "father" who provides for all your needs for all your life (a teaching a little too close to the life story of Donald Trump for comfort, these days). So what God provides is material; and it isn't.

God opening my lips would be very physical indeed, wouldn't it?  If God is opening my lips, is my mouth declaring God's praise? Or is it still God?  God talking to Godself?  That's a bit odd, isn't it? A little too recursive, at least. Praise doesn't come from God; praise comes from us.  Does God need it?  Is it an ego boost, like Jeff Goldblum's Zeus in the Netflix series "Kaos"?  If you don't know it, allow a small diversion.  Goldblum's Zeus sits on Olympus and expects prayers and attention and praise from humans (whom, he tells Dionysus by way of education, don't matter.  Only the "family" matters, meaning the Olympian Gods).  Getting such praise, he showers (literally; he makes it rain) beneficence on them.  Not hearing it, he grows petulant and decides to bring them back into line with plagues and natural disasters and, ultimately, wars and chaos.  Only then, he reasons, will they get back to the proper work of worshipping Zeus; oh, and the other gods.  After all, what are people for?

That's not the Christian idea of God, at all.  It is the idea of some baptized heathens and preachers of wealth, but it's no more Christian than Donald Trump is.  Praise to God is, as I said, for the human.  It's not for God.  It aligns the human before God, in the presence of God, in the awareness of God.  Humility clears away selfishness (Zeus, in my example, epitomizes selfishness.  Prometheus, the narrator, even tells us that Zeus was, at one time, fully human.  No duh. He certainly behaves like one, in the myths and in the Netflix series.).  Zeus, however, doesn't open anyone's lips; and nobody asks him to.  Zeus just expects praise for what he does (which, it turns out, is foster a massive lie that keeps him both immortal and possessing god-like power.  Remember Prometheus said Zeus was once human?  All too human, it turns out).

So asking God to open your lips, and in return your mouth will declare God's praise, is a different locution and request than we might be expecting.  It puts me in mind of my NT Professor's comment that he spent an entire graduate seminar examining the words of institution from the synoptics (there is no eucharist in John) and Paul's letters.  They couldn't find a direct comparison to Jesus telling his followers that bread was his body and wine his blood (symbolically; really; somewhere in between, all theories/arguments that came along centuries later, over a millenia for the first and third).  And please don't city Dionysus to me, that's completely inapplicable.  It's a bit of a mystery where it comes from, except full blown from the brow of Jesus; and what does it mean?  (Theologians and church fathers have been arguing over that one for over 2 millenia.)  This phrase from the Psalms is not quite so sui generis,  but it strikes me as refreshingly obvious and obscure at the same time.  It's really offering a bit of a deal, a bargain; but as I say, and as the Psalmist knows, praise is not for God's benefit, but for ours (if we can do anything to benefit God, then God is no better than Zeus, on Netflix or in the mythology).  Asking God to open your lips so your mouth can declare God's praise is a surprisingly intimate intimation of the relationship between pray-er and the God to whom the prayer (praise, to reiterate, is prayer; no reason it isn't) is directed.

Which, as I think of it, may go a long way to explaining why the Our Father is directed at what we need to do and what we can do for others; not what God can do for us or what we can ask God for (the most the prayer asks for is "this day our daily bread".  Not much at all, when you think about it.).  But that's a further consideration built on this one.  As usual, I tend to stop just when it's getting interesting.  It's a limitation of my mind; or of the forum.

I think this time I'll blame the forum.