Praise and Thanksgiving: Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A
Exodus 22:20-26; Psalm 18; 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10; Matthew 22:34-40
Today, we gather at Mass to offer praise and thanksgiving to the Heavenly Father in the life of Jesus. Today’s responsorial psalm explicitly praises God with the words, “Praised be the LORD, I exclaim, and I am safe from my enemies.” How is praise different from thanksgiving? In defining praise, Merlin Carothers writes, “To praise God is to express our acceptance of something that God is permitting to happen. So, to praise God for difficult situations, sickness, or disaster, means literally that we accept its happening as part of God’s plan to reveal His perfect love for us.”[i]
An example of praising the Heavenly Father by offering “difficult situations” and even a “disaster” to him is from Fr. Menard’s life as remembered by Fr. David Zercie. Fr. David told me that when he was a seminarian, the dormitory that he lived in caught on fire and burned down to the ground. Shortly after this fire, Fr. Menard gathered all the seminarians into the chapel to sing or say the Te Deum. The Te Deum is one of our oldest hymns and its title, Te Deum laudamus, means “We praise you, O God”.
This hymn supernaturally took all the pain, shock, and anguish all the seminarians felt and transformed it into an act of praise to the heavenly Father. On the natural level, as explained by Sean Tobin, the nervous systems of the seminarians and priests were calmed; Tobin writes, “When we sing—especially in community—our bodies release oxytocin, the bonding hormone that creates feelings of trust and safety. The vagus nerve, which helps regulate our fight-or-flight response, is activated during singing, literally calming our nervous system, which is why scared children instinctively sing to comfort themselves. They are biologically designed to find security in melody.” [ii]
While related to praise, thanksgiving is distinct from praise. In genuine thanksgiving, we thank someone for something we are truly grateful for. As applied in the spiritual life, we are to strive to become more aware of all the goodness that we experience and thank God for this goodness. For example, we can thank God for the goodness that we exist, that we breathe, and that we are baptized into the life of Jesus.
Fr. Spitzer cautions us from forcing ourselves to thank God for things that we do not actually feel grateful for. He writes:
[W]e should never force ourselves to be thankful to God for something we perceive to be inherently negative. By doing this, we reduce God to an unjust despot who orders us to be grateful for freezing conditions, dirt floors, and a cup of gruel. Moreover, we exhaust ourselves trying to put a happy face on a condition that is tearing us apart interiorly. Nothing good will come from this exercise in futility, because it comes neither from God nor good common sense. Thus, our best strategy is to thank God for the things we can perceive as good, which will allow the light of His love, redemption, and consolation to reemerge in our consciousness.[iii]
Heavenly Father, borrowing words from the Psalmist, we praise you, for in you we are totally safe from our enemies. – May God bless you all.
[i] Merlin R. Carothers, Power in Praise (Escondido, CA: Merlin R. Carothers, 1972); Sean Tobin and Boniface Hicks, Big GOD, Little Devil: A Radical Shift in the Approach to Spiritual Warfare and Deliverance (Encounter Publishing, 2025).
[ii] Sean Tobin and Boniface Hicks, Big GOD, Little Devil: A Radical Shift in the Approach to Spiritual Warfare and Deliverance(Encounter Publishing, 2025), 137.
[iii] Robert Spitzer, The Light Shines On in the Darkness: Transforming Suffering through Faith, Happiness, Suffering, and Transcendence 4 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), 199-200.
