One of my mentors in becoming a Christian was, at one point, barely able to feed his family because of a degenerative back condition, which prevented him from working and which would normally have led to paralysis. Because of this, his family was very poor and lived without many amenities the rest of us are used to.
When things got really hard, my friend would gather his family in the living room, take out his guitar, and start praising God in song. His wife and children would sing along, and—amid what seemed like total helplessness—they often experienced God’s presence.
In the Old Testament kingdom of Judah, things were once just as bad, if not worse. Jehoshaphat was on the throne, and the chosen people’s neighbors decided to gang up and invade with overwhelming force (cf. 2 Chron 20).
Jehoshaphat proclaimed a fast and held an assembly, where he prayed to God, reminding Him of His mighty deeds. He then admitted, before God and all his people, “We are powerless before this vast multitude that is coming against us.” He prayed, “We do not know what to do, so our eyes are toward You” (2 Chron 20:12).
God sent a prophet to assure Judah that “the battle is not yours but God’s,” and that God would provide the victory (2 Chron 20:15). The people assembled for war, and marched out to meet their enemies, with the Levitical choirs at the front of the army, “praising the holy Splendor” in the ancient terms of the Psalms of David: “Give thanks to the Lord, whose love endures forever” (20:21; cf. Psa 136).
The sacred author tells us, “at the moment [Judah] began their jubilant praise,” God “laid an ambush” against their enemies, causing them to destroy themselves. And so, when God’s people came to the field of battle, “there were only corpses fallen on the ground, with no survivors” (cf. 20:22–24).
Why was my friend’s instinct, like Jehoshaphat’s, to praise the Lord when everything looked hopeless? Why did another friend, familiar with suffering persecution for the sake of righteousness, insist to me that Jesus meant literally what He said when He instructed His persecuted disciples to jump and dance for joy (cf. Lk 6:23)? Why, when I followed my friend’s advice, did I experience an exhilarating sense of freedom?
Was all this mere catharsis, or wishful thinking? Or was it something else?
St. Paul suggests an answer to this question. In the famous “hymn to love”—which many of us have heard at weddings—the apostle says that “love never fails” (1 Cor 13:8) because it “rejoices with the truth” (13:6).
To praise God at all times (cf. Psa 34:1; Heb 13:15) is to rejoice with the truth. This is the truth that comes to Jesus’s disciples when they remain in His word, “and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32).
God is as great as our praises can make Him, no matter how we feel, no matter how much we are suffering (cf. Psa 145:3). To praise God in the midst of pain is to rejoice in this truth—to reach out of the experience of suffering, disorientation, confusion, pain, and depression to grasp the truth that sets us free.
For this reason, it seems, the Psalmist proclaims that God is “enthroned on the praises of Israel” (Psa 22:3, ESV). For God is Truth (cf. Jn 14:6; Deut 32:4, KJV). The Church’s praises form a kind of sacramental, which make present the power of the God who makes them His throne.
Accordingly, the psalmist, by a parallelism, compares praise to “a two-edged sword” (Psa 149:6; cf. Eph 6:17; Heb 4:12). Praise is a mighty spiritual weapon, far more powerful than mere “positive thinking.”
Like Jehoshaphat’s famous victory, my friend’s physicians eventually discovered how to heal his back, and he is without pain to this day. Whether this was a miracle depends on your definition of the word “miracle.” All I know is that praise of God sustained my friend’s family through their long period of trial and made it possible for them to arrive at the day of victory and healing.
The Psalms are full of praise, from praise in lament to praise in victory. Those who attend daily Mass or pray the Liturgy of the Hours know this well.
Sometimes, we can’t identify with the apparently exuberant attitude of the psalms we sing. It’s then that we must sing them most intentionally, for when we sing them, we unsheathe the two-edged sword that causes our enemies to stumble (cf. Psa 9:3–4).
In those moments, we are ourselves among the Levitical choirs that march in the front ranks of God’s victorious army. In those moments, we rejoice in the truth that sets us free.
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The featured image is “Mother Mourning the Death of her Child” (1845) by Giuseppe Molteni, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
