tehillah

This morning at church, our worship leader touched on something that I've been mulling over for awhile now. He said, "You don't have to come to worship pretending that you're happy even though your life sucks right now." It was refreshing to hear those words when, even without meaning to, it is so easy to walk into the church building and instantly pull on a mask with a plastic grin and a supply of three-word ways to escape personal questions from well-meaning people - like that annoying "How are you doing?" that always seems to come the moment I feel I might burst into tears.

And it's easy to stand up to sing feeling like I somehow owe God the lipservice of happiness that morning - like if I close my eyes and tap my foot and concentrate really hard, the lie that is my fake-happy attitude will become a reality, and the truth that is my brokenness will not have to be dealt with today.

But I've noticed something about relationships, and it's this: they thrive on honesty, not on lies. And our relationship with God is no different.

This is something I think the Hebrew child of God would have understood much better than the modern American Christian. In its Hebrew form, the Bible contains not one word for praise, but seven - yes, seven! - and one of them is a word that throws a wrench into our picture of worship as an experience that can only be associated with happiness or excitement.

This word transilerates to tehillah, and in its most concrete usage, it is comparable to the word "hymn" (the plural form, tehillim, is actually the Hebrew title of the book of Psalms). However, it is unique from the other six types of praise because it implies spontaneity - a song or a prayer that comes from the depths of one's current spiritual state, even when that is a state of pain, doubt, fear, or anger. The best way I've heard it described is a "pouring out" of oneself before God, which lends itself to the imagery of a drink offering: a complete surrender, a total exchange of my perspective for His.

One of the best examples of this kind of praise is Psalm 22:

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning. O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer; and by night, but I have no rest. Yet You are holy, O You who are enthroned upon the praises of Israel. In You our fathers trusted; they trusted and You delivered them. To You they cried out and were delivered; in You they trusted and were not disappointed.
- Psalm 22:1-5

At the top of this psalm in my Bible is a brief description that reads, "For the choir director; upon the Hind of the Morning. A Psalm of David." The "Hind of the Morning" may have been a popular song to which tune this psalm was written; the phrase describes the dark red pre-dawn that comes just before the sun's rising, when the deer awake to seek food and water. I imagine David awake through the night, cold and desperate and afraid, speaking these words from a position of prostration before God as the first light colors the morning sky. What a very different picture of praise than the one we often participate in on Sunday mornings.

Notice the structure of this first paragraph of David's lament. He begins with despair, with a brutally honest question that would be quoted by Jesus on the cross a thousand years later: "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" He accuses God of silence and of turning His back and of distancing Himself from His servant. There is no feigned happiness here - no attempt by David to disguise the brokenness of his soul and the pain of abandonment he is feeling. Words that we might call harsh, sacrilegious, unfair, short-sighted, or self-centered he freely pours out to God.

And this is key. This is the healing process that my falsely pious "happy face" on Sunday mornings will never achieve, for only in laying bare the truth of our spiritual ugliness will we ever allow God to remove it and replace it with His holiness. This is the very purpose of all our communication with God: to unclench our fists from their grip on our broken human perspective, release it to God, and accept into our open hands and hearts something new.

And see how that new perspective comes, once the old is let go? It comes in reminders of Who God is. "Yet You are holy," David says. Despite all he is feeling and fearing, God is holy. God remains "enthroned upon the praises (tehillim) of Israel." God is still the same God that David's ancestors have trusted in since Abraham - through the captivity in Egypt, the wandering in the wilderness, and the conquering of the Promised Land. Even in the desperation of his situation, David leans on God's track record of rescuing and protecting His chosen ones.

He does not come to God with a forced smile and an "I'm fine, everything will be okay, and God is great." Too often we want to skip the pouring out and go straight to the "You are holy"; we fear emptying ourselves in honesty and try to cram the truth into the same fist that holds the lies instead. But that is not tehillah. That is not healing. That is not surrender.

As my favorite singer/songwriter has said, "I do not know why I would go in front of You and hide my soul, because You're the only one who knows it." All we can gain by hiding our true selves from the One who already knows us completely is a distanced relationship that has been sabotaged by dishonesty and pride. But if we can surrender our masks and instead "draw near with confidence to the throne of grace" (Hebrews 4:16), we may find in our walk with God a genuine joy - joy that is grounded in Who He is, that will not shift with our moods or our circumstances, and that can transfigure our faces instead of merely hiding them.

So let us lament. Let us not be ashamed of speaking to God about what is really in the depths of our souls right now. Let us value the process of relinquishing ourselves to Him and letting Him fill us up with Himself.