[[Dear Sister, if you are a hermit (sorry, I mean because you are a hermit) how do you live a life in praise of God? You write this blog, which I need to thank you for, but how can you praise God if you live alone? Is your blog meant to carry out the idea of praising God? I know you say prayers which praise God but don't people need to hear your praise? Do you do more than this? You have written that canon 603 has certain central elements and one of these is "a life lived for the praise of God". Does this mean all your prayer is praise or all your life is or am I even close? Thank you.]]
You know, these are great questions, especially as you put matters at the end. You seem mainly to be thinking of praise of God as a matter of saying certain things including certain prayers or kinds of prayers, but at the end you broaden things. I think that's very insightful. I do agree that my whole life is meant to praise God; I think that's what the canon calls for so let me say more about what I think that actually means.
Praise is a form of evaluation, commendation, and even glorification (a term that also needs defining; cf below). When we praise someone we find them laudatory and commend them to others. If that person is a teacher, we commend their teaching by learning from them, by becoming wise in what we learn, and too we will share that learning with others. If the person is a realtor we let folks know they can trust that person to serve them in finding appropriate housing and related financing; we recommend them because they will do their best for those we send their way just as they did for us. When we praise a musician to friends, for instance, we do so in order that others may experience the musician's art; we do it so our friends' hearts and minds may be touched and shaped by an experience of skill, talent, and beauty; if we ourselves are musicians we may copy the musician's technique and allow their aesthetics to shape our own so that our own music-making is deepened and even wider audiences can be reached. This is praise. In even more serious matters we may commend or praise our physicians and recommend friends turn to them in their own medical needs. To sing someone's praises is to express gratitude for (and often to) them; it is to exhort others to let their lives be shaped by these persons, by their work and giftedness, as well as by the same kind of gratitude we have come to know.
Sometimes praise is more pro forma (as when we praise a six year old playing their very first notes on an out of tune violin!) -- though in such a case praise is critical for the child and heartfelt on some levels! But more often praise indicates the profound ways in which our lives are shaped for the better by the one being praised. This is, above all, the case with praise of God and especially with canon 603's requirement that the hermit's life be a life of praise for God. God creates us on an ongoing basis. At every moment he calls us into being and continues to call us into a covenantal existence lived with and in Him; God shapes us and makes us authentically human with his love. He forgives and brings us back to himself when we have fallen away from that love -- and he has done this again and again at great cost. When we allow God to create and recreate us, when we live from his love, tell others his story, stand strong in his truth, we praise God. More, we glorify or reveal him to others.
Hermits say with their lives that God alone is sufficient for us. God alone can complete us and bring us to fullness of life. We praise him by allowing these things to be true, by allowing them to be realized in space and time in our modest hermitages. To commit to this growth in wholeness and holiness is to praise God. Everything in the hermitage and the hermit's life is meant to foster this goal, this purpose. Assiduous prayer and penance (including the inner work we commit to in spiritual direction, etc.), stricter separation from all that is resistant to Christ or promises fulfillment apart from him (i.e., from "the world"), the silence of solitude, the evangelical counsels, and the limited ministry we might do outside the hermitage, all work together to make that praise concrete and pervasive.
I have written before here about human beings as "language events". We are created and shaped by the words spoken to us and we come to be articulations of their truth and power. I have also said that Christians are meant to become God's own prayers in our world; we are not merely to reflect God's Word or to pray occasionally or even frequently, but always. We are called to be prayer, and most profoundly -- to be God's own prayer in the world. Similarly then, we are to praise God with our lives. We are meant to live those lives in light of God and reveal (glorify) that same light in all we say and do precisely so that in some way, at some time, others may come to know that same God and the humanity he makes possible. Again, this is praise.
I don't need other people to hear what I say or see what I do for this praise to be real, though of course it does bring things full circle when I share with others the fruits of eremitical life. (This answers your question about this blog; yes, blogging is a chance to "praise God" sometimes, as we all ordinarily understand that action, but also by sharing the nature of ecclesial eremitical vocations with readers. In this vocation God is understood to be doing both something ancient and something very new. To represent this clearly is praising God by pointing to the way God is working in our World and Church.) At the same time, simply to live an integral life in the power of the Spirit of God is to live a life of praise. After all, my life in and of itself witnesses to the sufficiency of God for each of us; to do that then is to praise and glorify God.
I hope this helps.
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