Praise is our soul's most natural, primal voice - praise that we are alive because God is alive! Praise for God's continuing Presence, His breath holding all creation in existence.
How mysterious it is that sometimes when we feel bound and tied by anxiety, thrust into the fiery furnace of grief or heavy burdens, that suddenly, spontaneous prayers of praise come forth from our hearts, as if the Holy Spirit, Who prays within us, knows what prayers we need to pray at that moment more than we do ourselves!
We are suddenly able to pray like three young Jewish men once prayed in a fiery furnace in Babylon...
In the Book of Daniel, (chapter 3), Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar lays siege to Jerusalem, and is given four young men of Judah to take back to Babylon and have trained to enter his service. Once in Babylon, three of the young men are pressured to worship the golden statue which the the King has had made. When they refuse, he has them bound and then cast into a white hot furnace to burn to death.
Instead of burning to death, the young men walk about, amid the white hot flames, singing to God, blessing God:
"Blessed are You, O Lord, the God of our fathers,
praiseworthy and exalted above all forever..."
The young men call on all of creation to praise and bless the Lord - sun, moon, stars, winds, fire, frost, nights and days, seas, mountains, everything growing from the earth, water creatures, birds, and beasts, angels, and all sons and daughters of men - until everyone and everything throughout the Universe is singing and dancing in unison in a grand and glorious epiphany of praise.
Can we allow our souls to sing in such perfect trust in our own fiery furnaces? Can we trust that even our heaviest griefs and burdens are a dark, mysterious yet necessary part of the glorious song of the Universe? That there is Light to balance the Darkness? Hope to balance the Despair? Life to triumph in the end over every form of Death? Can we trust that the Holy Spirit prays in us and for us and through us?
Kahlil Gibran, the wonderful Lebanese poet mystic who drew from the deep well of Christian, Muslim Sufi, Jewish, and Ba'hai mystical traditions, wrote on Prayer -
"And if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing.
When you pray, you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet.
Therefore let your visit to that temple invisible be for naught but ecstasy and sweet communion....
I cannot teach you how to pray in words.
God listens not to your words save when he Himself utters them through your lips.
And I cannot teach you the prayer of the seas and the forests and the mountains.
But you who are born of the mountains and the forests and the seas can find their prayer in your heart,
And if you but listen in the stillness of the night you shall hear them saying in silence,
'Our God, who art our winged self, it is Thy will in us that willeth.
"It is Thy desire in us that desireth...
"We cannot ask Thee for naught, for Thou knowest our needs before they are born in us:
"Thou art our need; and in giving us more of Thyself thou givest us all.'"
The King of Babylon looks into the furnace and sees the three young men walking, still alive, accompanied by one who looks like a Son of God, - an angel. Because of God's Messenger, standing side by side with God's beloved sons in the furnace, the King calls the three young men out of the furnace.
As, through God's enduring Presence, we too will be delivered out of our furnaces one day. Praise God!