Hallowed

Hallowed is one of those words that people skip over as they read, having a vague sense of what it might mean and figuring that the context will take care of our understanding. It is like prodigal; we hear the story of the prodigal son over and over, but most of us have no idea what the word means. (Prodigal means wastefully extravagent. It may be time to begin using the word beyond its Gospel association; our society seems pretty prodigal at the moment.)

Hallowed means "honored as holy" or "greatly revered." It is not enough to say holy and leave it at that because the point should really be about our attitude toward that holiness. It is like the point often made about believing in God: many people seem content to say that they believe in God, as if that were enough, but Satan believes in God; however, his attitude toward God is not the best. Saying that God--or God's name--is holy is merely stating a fact. We must go further, we must commit to an attitude about that holiness.

So, how do we honor or revere God? Is it something we keep inside us, or do we need to show someone? Is it enough that God knows how we feel, or do we need to share our feelings with others? It would be easy to argue either side of this point: we are admonished that the person who prays loudly in public has already received his reward--but wait, that is the hypocrite who prays loudly; is it the public nature of the prayer or the hypocritical nature of the pray-er that Christ is chastising? That seems to be more to the point. It is not so much how we praise God--what words we use, where we do it, what form it takes--as it is how we do it, as in how we have fixed our heart.

Honoring the holiness of God, giving God our respect, our love, our praise, our all, can take many forms. Yet, it does not have to be formulaic; we don't all have to do it the same way. Some may choose to pray silently. Some may pray their praises loudly, shouting to the Lord. Some may sing. Some cry out from their hearts. Some dance, some bang a gong, some write words on paper. Some share their praises with groups, large or small, and some find a secret place and share only with God. Whatever way we choose to honor our God, we must have one thing--and only one thing--in common. There may be as many ways of praising God as there are individuals who are doing the praising, but they all have one common quality: it has to be sincere.

False reverence is, in most cases probably, too harsh an accusation. At least, intentional false reverence is probably too harsh. Most of us are probably more likely guilty of unintentional false reverence--our hallowed is hollow. We say the words without putting the emotion into them. We do not set out to disrespect God, but how would we feel if someone were talking to us from a script? And we're not talking about Meryl Streep or Russell Crowe reading from a script--we are all too often more like a reluctant middle-schooler reading Shakespeare in class. The words may be there, but where is the heart?

The most important step in honoring God, then, would be to approach God with an attitude that is intentional. We must focus on God and on our relationship with Him. We must praise with our hearts, and our hearts must be filled with love and respect and joy and gratitude. We must place ourselves before God and acknowledge His greatness. A friend of mine, many years ago when we were in college and had time to talk about such things, commented on what he thought was the most impressive aspect of the original Star Trek movie: he observed that the movie was, in one way of looking at things, a study in scale. As the movie begins, we see a person working on the Enterprise, and we are impressed with the size of the star ship. Later, we see the Enterprise dwarfed by the alien ship, and by association we are awed at the sheer size of the latter. In a similar way, we can begin to glimpse the majesty of God by visualizing ourselves on the Earth, then seeing the Earth in the galaxy, and finally placing the galaxy in the known universe. All of this is much like the passage in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, where Rebecca tells George about the letter the minister sent to Jane Crofut, which is ultimately addressed to someplace in God's mind.

But God's greatness is not limited to size or power. Recognizing that Christ is the earthly incarnation of God allows us to perceive that God, even in His glory and majesty, is humble and quiet, that He experiences peace and humility in ways that we cannot. God's greatness extends in all directions; we as humans, and especially we as Americans, are programmed to see greatness mainly in terms of grandeur. Many of the poets see God in the little things. Walt Whitman observed that "a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels. . . ."

Once we have realized our feelings toward God, we have to find the ways we will express them. Having the feelings without acting upon them is almost as bad as going through the motions without having the feelings. Acting upon our feelings, this thing of which we speak, can be called praise and worship. It is whatever we do to show honor and reverence to God. As we have already noted, we will each praise and worship in our own way. There is no right and proper way to do this, so long as we are doing it sincerely. (Actually, I have taught enough high school students to know that someone will say, "Oh, I guess that means I can sacrifice kittens," or "Let's sin, but do it with sincere reverence." As I reveal to my students, some questions have many correct or valid answers but have many more wrong answers--and the same applies to our praise and worship. Just because there are a multitude of ways to show our reverence and honor to God, that doesn't mean that there aren't any wrong ways.)

As we pray, we have to pray with feeling. We have to invest ourselves into our prayers. When we can do that, we can truthfully and sincerely intone the word hallowed as it applies to God and His name. We can pray as we were instructed.