Bread of Life Voice

Praise is the form of prayer which recognizes most immediately that God is God. It lauds God for his own sake and gives him glory, quite beyond what he does, but simply because HE IS.

It shares in the blessed happiness of the pure of heart who love God in faith before seeing him in glory. By praise, the Spirit is joined to our spirits to bear witness that we are children of God, testifying to the only Son in whom we are adopted and by whom we glorify the Father (Rom 8:16).

Praise embraces the other forms of prayer and carries them toward him who is its source and goal: the “one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist” (1 Cor. 8:6).

“[Address] one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart” (Col 3:16). Like the inspired writers of the New Testament, the first Christian communities read the Book of Psalms in a new way, singing in it the mystery of Christ.

In the newness of the Spirit, they also composed hymns and canticles in the light of the unheard – of event that God accomplished in his Son: his Incarnation, his death which conquered death, his Resurrection, and Ascension to the right hand of the Father.

Doxology, the praise of God, arises from this “marvelous work” of the whole economy of salvation.

(Culled from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) 2639, 2641)