“Dumb Ox”. Each time I find myself several steps behind in conversations with our grandchildren I relate to this moniker given to St. Thomas Aquinas by his confreres. In fairness, in his case it had to do with his laconicism and physical size and not with any mental obtuseness. I thought of the Angelic Doctor recently while contemplating the word ‘hallow’. What does it mean? Is it relevant?
The Lord’s Prayer is the quintessentially Christian prayer. In his exposition of the seven petitions in the prayer St. Thomas emphasizes the first, the ‘sanctificatur nomen tuum’, translated as ‘hallowed be thy name’. To hallow God’s name is to recognize and reverence God’s holiness. The primacy of this petition is significant. Informed by the words taught to us by Jesus himself we make requests on our own behalf only after praising God. Praising God is our first responsibility.
To praise is to worship. The paramountcy of our obligation to worship is consistent in both the First and Second Testaments. In Deuteronomy 6.5 the Hebrews are enjoined to love God with all their heart, mind and strength. The first three of the Ten Commandments relate to the holiness of God and our obligations to him. Those concerning our personal behavior come later. When Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is, he references the Deuteronomic imperative before adding the second concerning our need to love one another.
Why is all this pertinent? It seems today that we are forgetting how to ‘hallow’. And, if we do verbalize praise, it is in rote recitation. Who would deny that our society is losing its sense of the sacred – a sense which in the roots of our civilization nourished our respect not just for the Divine but, consequently, also for all creation? The claim on our currency notwithstanding, who would dispute the counterclaim that not only have we abandoned trust in God we have abandoned God?
What happens to ethics in a world without God? If the only ‘law’ we honor is civic law what motivation is there to ‘walk the extra mile’, to ‘turn the other cheek’, to forgive? The edifying aspiration to be ‘good’ devolves to the socially acceptable commitment to be ‘nice’. What would the world be like if there were no transcendent Truth or if transcendent truth’s only obligation were to be nice?
Jesus tells us to address God as ‘our Father’ and with childlike wonder to trust and respect him as we would our earthly fathers. What happens if we don’t? Is there a connection between our disregard of the Heavenly Father and the rise of paternal absenteeism in our world today? Are we twenty-first century grown-ups any better off ignoring divine paternal guidance than an adolescent struggling to find his way without the benefit of an earthly father’s counsel?
Speaking of fathers, George Washington – the ‘father of our nation’ – included in his celebrated farewell address these apropos remarks: “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle”. In today’s secular, cancel culture environment we have smothered reason with Orwellian confusion and have eradicated experience with unprecedented impunity. Whither national morality?
Our tradition of hallowing, of respecting the sacred, is being eviscerated. A house built on sand will not survive. Neither will a society which ignores the Devine. Let’s pray our hallowing never rings hollow.