With the Father and the Son He is Adored and Glorified
However much controversy may have surrounded the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, the Creed has always been definite that all three Persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are to be given the adoration and glory due to God alone.
This raises several points of confusion for different people.
First off, ask some, if Christians are only supposed to adore and glorify God the Blessed Trinity, then why do Catholics (and, in fact, all apostolic Churches) have hymns and prayers of praise for Mary and sundry saints?
Three Kinds of Honor
To clear up that issue, it must be understood that honor is a species of love. As Jesus taught, there are two great commandments concerning our duty to love:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)
Note that loving your neighbor does not rob God of love. On the contrary, it is the way you show your love for God. Indeed, John tells us that if we do not love our neighbor whom we have seen, we do not love God whom we have not seen (cf. 1 John 4:20).
For this reason, the Church has never believed honor is a zero sum game in which all honor paid to a saint or a creature is honor stolen from God. Rather, she has always taught that God is pleased to exalt his creatures and that the love of his creatures one for another is one more way in which God himself is loved and gives love. Moreover, with such love there is no limit, only due proportion. In other words, we must not love any creature more than we love God, but we should love our neighbors as much as we can out of the love we owe, above all, to God. So, following Paul, the Church had always insisted that we are supposed to give “honor to whom honor is due” (Romans 13:7). At the same time, we are to remember that creatures are due different kinds of honor and that no creature is due the highest honor and love that is God’s alone.
How does this work on the ground? Fairly simply. You go to the ballgame and you cheer for the hero of the game. You are neither robbing God of honor nor mistaking the hero for God. You buy Mom a Mother’s Day card in obedience to the commandment to honor your father and mother (cf. Exodus 20:12). In so doing, you are actually loving God by obeying him. You go to a play and applaud, thereby honoring the cast and crew. You admire a beautiful song, thereby honoring both the creature called “music” and the musician who composed and plays the music—and the God who made the musician and gifted him with his creativity and skill. You gootchy-goo a cute baby, thereby honoring both the child and his parents while also making his Maker’s heart swell with joy.
More than this, we recognize degrees and kinds of honor as well. When the electrician comes to visit, we pay him a certain kind of honor by shaking his hand, welcoming him, thanking him and so forth. When the queen walks in, we treat her with the honor due her office, just as we do the electrician. But however respectful we are of the electrician, we do not honor him in the same way as we do the queen. We do not slap the queen on the back and say, “Am I glad to see you!” Nor do we assemble a full honor guard to salute the arriving electrician. Likewise, were the Blessed Virgin Mary to appear to us, she alone of all creatures in the universe would be the one whom we could honor with the words, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:42-43). But we would not say to her, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). Those words are reserved for God alone.
For this reason, the Church has distinguished three basic kinds of honor.
So asking a saint to pray for us, or praising that saint for helping us in some way is not idolatry any more than asking your Mom to babysit and thanking her for doing so is idolatry.
Why Does God Command Us to Adore and Glorify Him?
Another other thing that causes a real difficulty for some people is the question, “Why does God command our worship at all? Is this not a barbaric view of God which imagines him to be a psychologically and emotionally needy tyrant who is angered if his subjects do not constantly praise him?”
Of course, Scripture and the Catholic tradition understand that God has need of nothing, including our praise, and especially not our flattery. Indeed, many times in Scripture, God forcefully rejects the empty flattery of human beings. What God seeks is our transformation into creatures capable of genuine love for him and for our neighbor, not ego-stroking flattery.
But if this is so, the question then becomes, “What then is the point of commanding worship since love that is compelled is no love at all?”
The answer is that the command to adore and glorify God and love him with our whole heart, mind, and strength is for our benefit, not his. The Father has no fragile ego to protect but is, rather, all self-giving love. That love he pours into the Son and God the Son returns it to the Father from before the foundation of world. In assuming our humanity, the Son makes that humanity (and us) part of his perfect gift of adoration to the Father, saying:
“Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him power over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work which you gave me to do; and now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory which I had with you before the world was made.” (John 17:1-5)
But remember the context of those words. They are not spoken at some religious retreat in a wooded glade while sweet music is playing. They are spoken mere hours before the torment, agony, and death that he knows is coming. Jesus’ self-offering in worship of the Father is one that costs him everything. And that is something we cannot do without his help. So Paul tells us:
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:26-27)
This points to something profound about the nature of Christian worship: that it is something going on in God from all eternity long before it is something that we do or even think to do. Once again, we see that grace is always prior to us; that we do not choose Jesus but rather he chooses us and that apart from him we can do nothing (cf. John 15:5, 26). In other words, our very capacity to worship is always a gift of the Holy Spirit and our worship is, if you will, “God-kindled”. We learn to worship God and are enabled to do so by listening to the Holy Spirit, especially in the Scriptures he inspired, by receiving his divine life in the Eucharist and other sacraments, and by imitating Jesus. Through the common life, common worship, and common teaching of the Church, we are trained to love God with body, soul, mind, and spirit and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
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