That in All Things God May Be Glorified
I’ve been wondering about glory.
The Benedictine motto, ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus, translates “that in all things God may be glorified,” and while I can appreciate that this expresses an essential and defining aspiration, I have to admit I hadn’t really considered what it might mean beyond its most surface level. Watching our beloved monks move between prayer and campus activities with their characteristic humility and kindness, however, I’ve been thinking lately about the motto by which they live.
When the word “glory” comes to mind, usually I imagine some variation on magnificence: the gold of kingship, trumpets blaring, towering mountains, blinding sunsets, or a thundering host. Certainly we have no shortage of evidence of God’s greatness, grandeur, and omnipotence, as the psalmist reminds us daily, but this vision of glory still seems insufficient. After all, what does glory mean – not to a human perspective anchored in notions of earthly dominion – but to a God who makes Himself bread for us? What does it mean when we consider that God embraced our lowliness with so much tenderness that His birth elicited both singing angels and a bed made from a feeding trough? Or that He died the death of a criminal and an outcast to save us from the consequences of our own sin?
God reveals Himself not only in the brilliant light of the Transfiguration or the radiance on Mt Sinai – which so filled Moses’ face that he had to veil himself when he returned to the people – but also in the Cross and the poor. The earth quakes at the voice of its Maker, mountains melt like wax, and yet God speaks to us in the “still, small voice,” and Christ calls Himself “meek and humble of heart.” There is more to this worship we owe to God, then – and which fills the created world – than thunder and clamoring gold.
When I pray that in all things God may be glorified, what am I asking?
As I return to these words, I realize that the motto’s passive construction means that God is the object, rather than the subject, of the clause. “All things” act, while God receives the action, in itself a startling and a humbling invitation to the “ora et labora” of Benedictine life: whereby we respond in word and deed to the very source of our active being – to all we can do or say. It reminds me of the priest’s prayer at Mass, “…that our praise adds nothing to Your greatness, but our thanksgiving is itself your gift.” If God doesn’t need our praise (and He doesn’t), but our “thanksgiving is itself His gift,” then surely it comes down to love.
God is omnipotent and utterly beyond our power, but He also gives us freedom to act and to participate in His life. He loves us, draws near to us, and takes on our very humanity in Christ. Without diminishing His glory or power, He actively embodies – and transfigures – the reality of human love: that by loving someone, we allow them the power to hurt us. We choose to will their good – the life for which God created them – even if it leads us to the cross.
To pray that God may be glorified in all things is also to pray that we – in our lives and relationships, our prayers and work – will embrace the love of God with joyful participation, inviting Him to love and live in us with the full freedom of our will. Our praise and gratitude pleases God not because he requires magnification but because He loves us – and all those we encounter. He knows that our turning toward Him unites us more authentically with His will, which is Love and the source of our deepest happiness.
By voicing our desire to give Him glory, we take part in the eternal hymn of praise that, in the great paradox of God’s incarnate Love, is both beyond us in its undiminished and perpetual beauty and also awaiting our beloved voice. It’s a prayer I hope to learn how to make more authentically, looking to the monks of Belmont Abbey and all those who imitate Christ in His glorious humility.
May we all draw closer to the God who loves us, that in all things God may be glorified!
