Daily Devotional for Small Group Discussion: Praise

Discussion Questions 

1. Read Psalm 148. Then read the devotional below, “Praise.” 

2. How do you listen for the sea monsters’ choruses of praise? How do you watch the music of the stars? How do we (or can we) comprehend the wild praises of creation? 

3. What is the role of imagination in your faith?  

4. When has a work of fiction inspired your spirit? 

Praise the Lord! Praise God, sun and moon; praise God, all you shining stars! Praise God from the earth, you sea monsters and creatures of the depths, you fire and hail, snow and frost! – Psalm 148:1-2, 7-8 (NRSV adapted) 

What makes the T-Rex dinosaur a scientific fact and the Loch Ness monster an ancient myth? 

It’s a rhetorical question, mainly. To a large extent, I believe the distinction doesn’t matter. It’s certainly not worth fighting over. It doesn’t make much difference in the daily lives of millions of people.  

But the question of science vs. myth points my spirit toward something important: faith needs fiction, perhaps far more than it needs facts.  

By which I mean: faith needs imagination. Wild and wondering and expansive imagination. Faith needs the unimaginable and the improbable. Faith needs awe. It needs questions that cannot be answered; it needs stories that reach beyond the limits of knowledge.  

While faith might long to claim certainty, it does its best work when it claims surrender. When it gives in to hope. When it opts for unearned trust. When it lives in dreams and aspirations beyond what can be proven. When it tells stories. 

Madeleine L’Engle wrote in Glimpses of Grace: “Myth is the closest approximation to truth available to the finite human being.” 

Somewhere in the chasms of the oceans, there are sea monsters praising God. The Bible tells us so, although we may never know whether the psalmist was writing about a cousin of Loch Ness, a descendent of T-Rex, or a creature of the psalmist’s own imagination. The provability of the monster isn’t the point. 

The point is creation’s praise for God, which is beyond imagining. In fact, creation’s praise of God is so vast and wild that it can only be told in fiction. 

Prayer
Praise God for the praises too mystical and magical for me to perceive!