The Skunk Praises God Better Than I Do

I wrote last week about how my family endured a "skunk" attack. The dogs went out at 3:30 a.m. and came back smelling like a combination of burnt rubber and onion juice. Then they jumped on my bed. Even a week later, despite all our efforts, I still catch a whiff of it in the house from time to time.

And I was tempted, in that moment, to curse the skunk for being a skunk.

But the problem wasn't the skunk.  The skunk did exactly what a skunk does.

And whatever else you might say about that animal, this much is true: it has never once tried to be a rabbit. It has never worried that its gift was unappealing to we humans. It simply is what it was made to be, with a completeness that no human being I know has ever managed for more than an hour here or there.

This is the strange, humbling scandal at the heart of one of the oldest hymns in Scripture.

Three young men are thrown into a furnace stoked seven times hotter than usual, and rather than screaming, they sing. What they sing is a litany that sweeps the whole created order into praise: sun and moon, dew and frost, ice and snow, mountains and hills, all the birds of the air, whales and everything that moves in the waters, and finally, almost as an afterthought, human beings.

(A brief note on the text: this canticle appears in Daniel 3 between verses 23 and 24 in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, but is absent from most Protestant editions, because it survives in the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew Masoretic text of Daniel. I explained the history of that difference in detail last week in The Prayer from Inside the Fire.)

 

Everything Blesses God Except the One Who Chooses

Read the canticle slowly and something odd emerges. Nearly every creature named in it praises God without any decision to do so. "Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord; sing praise to him and highly exalt him forever" (Daniel 3:57, NRSV-2CE).

The frost is not being pious. The whale is not being devout. The mountain has no interior life to offer. And yet the hymn insists they are praising, and praising rightly.

How? In what way does a rock praise God better than I do? How does a skunk, even, offer purer worship to God than we do with all our best efforts?

By existing exactly as God made them.

A rock glorifies God by being unfailingly a rock. The pine does not obsess over becoming an oak. The light does not resent the dark, nor the dark envy the light; the hymn blesses both, side by side, without apology: "Bless the Lord, nights and days; sing praise to him and highly exalt him forever. Bless the Lord, light and darkness" (Daniel 3:71-72).

Even what we would call a diminishment, even the dark, is folded into the praise, because it is what God made it and it is doing what God made it to do.

Then the hymn arrives at us, and everything changes. "Bless the Lord, all people on earth; sing praise to him and highly exalt him forever" (Daniel 3:82).

Here alone the praise must be chosen. Here alone the creature with a will to decide is free to decline. Here alone the creature can spend a lifetime trying to be something other than what it was made to be, and call that ambition.

The skunk is not holier than you. But it is more obedient to its nature than most of us manage to be for a single day.

 

The Furnace as a Place of Self-Forgetting

Notice where this song is sung. Not from a temple. Not from safety. From inside the fire.

Something happens in a furnace that happens almost nowhere else: pretense burns off.

The three young men have already lost every prop of identity that the world offered them. They have refused promotion, refused to worship the golden statue, refused the survival strategy of blending in.

They stand in the flames stripped of everything but what they actually are: creatures made and loved by God.

And precisely there, they discover they are free enough to notice the whales.

This is the counterintuitive shape of humility.

Their song is almost entirely not about them.

If I'd been throne in that furnace, most of my prayers would probably be all about me. I know that because when I've gone through any difficulty, any furnace-like season, that's the shape my prayers took.

But ninety percent of this song sang by three men in a fiery furnace is a delighted inventory of other creatures doing their jobs. Only near the end do they mention their own predicament, and even then briefly.

The furnace has done its work: it has burned away self-preoccupation and left them able to see.

Most of us have furnaces of our own, and most of us respond to them by becoming more absorbed in ourselves, not less. The pain draws all the attention inward. What the three young men show is that the fire can also be the place where the self finally becomes small enough to see the sun and moon again.

 

Neither Less Nor More

Humility is one of the most misunderstood words in our Christian vocabulary.

We treat it as a mild form of self-contempt, a habit of downgrading ourselves in public. But the etymology points elsewhere: humilitas comes from humus, soil, earth.

To be humble is to remember what you are made of. And what we are made of, according to Genesis, is dust and divine breath, "the dust of the ground" and "the breath of life" (Genesis 2:7).

Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is not thinking more of yourself. It is the accuracy of knowing that you are dust that God chose to breathe into.

St. Irenaeus wrote that "the glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God" (Against Heresies, IV.20.7).

We are most fully alive not when we are most impressive, but when we are looking at God rather than at ourselves.

The mountain does not need to look at God, because it cannot look at anything. We can. That is our unique dignity, and our unique burden. The creature who can turn away is the same creature who can turn toward.

 

Practical Steps

Make this canticle your own. Look around at all the things that bless God better than you do. The maple in the yard. The frost on the windshield. The dog. Yes, even Mr. Skunk. Name it, and bless God for it doing exactly what it was made to do. If this doesn't teach us humility I don't know what will.

Identify one performance you are maintaining to be blessed by men. Somewhere you are working to appear as something other than what you are. Competent when you are lost. Fine when you are grieving. Certain when you are afraid. Name it privately before God today. Do not fix it. Just stop pretending in front of Him.

Pray for someone you have wounded with words. Not a general apology to the universe. One person, by name, asking God to give them a grace you cannot give them yourself. Ask that they become holier than you. Mean it. This is the sharpest tool in the box for burning off self-preoccupation, and it hurts exactly as much as it should.

When the furnace comes, look outward. The next time something genuinely painful lands, make it a rule to spend the first words of your of prayer on someone else's need. The fire will still be hot. But you will be standing in it as the three young men did, singing.

Let the whole of my life be a single verse in that hymn: one small creature, doing what it was made to do, blessing the Lord with every breath and every heartbeat, and asking nothing more.

God Bless,

Judah

P.S. I wrote this prayer this morning. Feel free to make it your own. Add to it, revise it. Do not give me credit for it. Nothing I have to offer belongs to me, but was given to me. To God alone be the glory: 

O Lord, Your love is endless,

Your mercies ever new.

You who created us in Your love,

have so seen fit to embrace me in Your Heart.

 

I have fixated on my wounds,

but rarely prayed for those I wounded.

For these, I can do nothing but pray.

 

I offer my will, my heart,

my every sorrow and suffering,

my every humiliation,

my very weakness, even my life.

 

I offer to You, Lord, myself as a victim,

a holocaust to Your merciful Love.

 

That all these beloved souls might know Your love,

might receive Your grace,

and be cherished in Your Sacred Heart.

 

I beg that they become holier than I.

That they become saints,

remembered and cherished,

and that I should be forgotten by men,

but remembered only as a victim of Your Love!