In praise of praise

How the right words at the right moment affirm our humanity

I started writing and editing wedding speeches professionally a dozen years ago. In that time I’ve learned a lot, not only about what makes a good speech, but also about the magic that still lurks behind the designer dresses, extravagant cakes and unfathomably expensive stationery of the modern wedding business. A wedding is a ritual shaped as much by deep tradition as by its actual planners.

Clients are often anxious not to commit a faux pas like forgetting to acknowledge this or that member of the wedding party. But what I’ve found is that the important ‘rules’ of wedding speeches are at once less formal and more basic. Like flattering the bride.

"Miss Piggy in Wedding dress in 2010" by thotfulspot is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I remember smiling to myself early on, when I looked at a draft written by a father of the bride. He planned to start by telling his daughter that, when he’d set eyes on her the moment before walking her down the aisle – something that of course would not happen until shortly before the speech – ‘You took my breath away’.

‘Really?’ I thought. How could he know? And, worse, what if having committed to such a visceral response, when the moment actually came, he found himself underwhelmed? Imagine the disappointment! The guilt!

I was overthinking it. I now like to imagine that, in the event, seeing his daughter did take this man’s breath away, or at least that she looked sufficiently lovely that the expression did not feel too much. In any case, I realised that a wedding speech had to take certain things for granted. The breathtaking – or at least ‘breathtaking’ – appearance of the bride being one of them. With or without explicit instructions from fathers of the bride, grooms or best men, I got into the habit of describing countless brides as beautiful, gorgeous and stunning. In many cases without having seen so much as a passport photo.

(One groom complained that I’d used the word beautiful twice. I thought perhaps he meant in one sentence, and checked the draft; no, twice in the course of a ten-minute groom’s speech. I tried to assure him this was all right, but he was sceptical. I hope he’s enjoying his divorce.)

Still, I did wonder about the honesty of this practice. Sometimes I would try to add a telling detail to make the compliment at least more personal. The questionnaire my colleagues and I use to gather information does have a question about the bride’s appearance. But the answer is rarely useful on its own. ‘When I saw you standing there – 5’6, slim, brunette – well, you took my breath away.’

Over time, I resigned myself to pretty generic compliments, having come to understand that few brides are particularly interested in originality of expression when it comes to being told how beautiful they are.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that I’d been inwardly rehearsing an ancient debate between two rabbis and their followers. Two thousand years ago, the schools of Hillel and Shammai argued over many aspects of Jewish ritual as well as theology. When it came to weddings, Beit Shammai insisted it is wrong to speak falsely by praising a bride as fair and attractive when she is not. Beit Hillel demurred: it is a courtesy to offer praise, and makes everyone feel better.

Anyway, we might add, aren’t all brides beautiful in their way? Unless something’s gone horribly wrong, they’re happy. Happy people are always attractive. If you can’t see that, the problem is you, not the cross-eyed, buck-toothed bride. Of course, self-importance, cynicism or indigestion do sometimes keep us from noticing that kind of beauty. We might even resent the perceived obligation to offer praise when we’re just not feeling it. Indeed, that resentment might not even be about whether the praise is merited or not.     

In his book Reflections on the Psalms (1958), CS Lewis includes a typically disarming confession, and expresses the hope that his readers will not be ‘thick-headed’ enough to have got into the same difficulty. That difficulty is that, when he first became a Christian, Lewis had stumbled over the idea that God demands praise:

‘We all despise the man who demands continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence or delightfulness; we despise still more the crowd of people round every dictator, every millionaire, every celebrity, who gratify that demand. Thus a picture, at once ludicrous and horrible, both of God and of His worshippers, threatened to appear in my mind’

Far from being a quirk of Lewis’ youth, though, this recoiling from the idea of God’s demanding (and receiving) praise became part of the standard-issue scepticism of the postwar generations that followed him. And, again, it’s not really about whether God deserves praise or not. It must occur to anyone who thinks about it from the perspective of our prevailing secular culture to ask: ‘What does it say about “God” that he wants to be fawned over with gushing praise all the time?’ Stroppy teenagers of all ages have considered the matter and cast their verdict.

The error, though, is to think of God as one of us, which is to say not really God. What Max Weber called the disenchantment of modernity can also be seen as a kind of flattening out: that is, if we must consider God, we’ll grant him the bare minimum of divinity, and then fault him for getting too big for his boots. But to entertain the idea of a God who is unworthy of constant praise – or indeed one who requires praise in a needy, human way – is not really to entertain the idea of God at all. Almighty God, that is, the Creator of the Universe. Remember him? Whether that God exists or not, a refusal even to wrestle with the idea surely reduces the scope of the human imagination.

Lewis’ discussion of this is worth reading in its own right. For my purposes, what’s important is the idea that praise is not something this Almighty God needs or craves. It matters because it completes the worshipper’s ‘enjoyment’ of God.

We rave about the music we like, or books and films that have moved us; we gush about dramatic sunsets and even ‘glorious weather,’ because sharing our appreciation with others is a kind of consummation of our own enjoyment. As Lewis puts it: ‘all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it’. 

Of all the forms of religion and religiosity, it is perhaps this kind of overflowing, wide-eyed, joy-filled praise of God that is most at odds with today’s secular culture. I mean, it’s embarrassing. You can talk all you like about the valuable moral lessons contained in the Christian and other religious traditions. You can point out that, statistically, religious people tend to lead more stable, healthier and even happier lives. Just don’t get that look in your eye.

If ‘shyness or the fear of boring others’ often check the overflowing of explicitly religious feeling, something similar does seem to bubble forth in other forms. Think of the way people go on about feelings of ‘gratitude’ that seem to have no particular object. Or make awkward references to ‘the universe’ and its mysterious machinations. Or simply marvel at the existence of something rather than nothing. In the words of Des’ree, ‘Life, oh life, oh life, oh life / Doo doo doo doo’.

The instinct to praise is never far from the surface of our consciousness. Mostly, it is sparked by small things, but it imbues those small things with meaning. And mostly-unconscious rituals affirm and reinforce that meaning. Encourage us to notice it and to enjoy it. They humanise our experience.

If you go out for a meal with someone, for example – maybe not me, but someone with social graces – when your food arrives, they’ll often say something like, ‘Ooh, that looks nice! I’m jealous now!’ This is not – or not simply – an objective appraisal of how the food looks. Nor is it a lie or misrepresentation; you can see the food for yourself, and if it looks less than appealing, your companion will probably talk about something else. Praising your food is an attempt, usually an instinctive and uncalculating one, to influence your own perception of it. To help you enjoy it.

It might seem unfortunate to speak of wedding guests ‘enjoying’ the bride. But, in Lewis’ terms, they surely do. Praising her – either in a speech or just as part of the general buzz of the wedding – is not about placating Bridezilla, but about entering into the spirit of the ritual. Yes, flattery might make the bride feel good (and, as Beit Hillel has it, enhance the groom’s appreciation of his ‘acquisition’). But more importantly, the very fact that it’s a cliché, the fact that a cynic might doubt its sincerity, makes such praise meaningful in another way.

It signifies that the person offering praise is not an impartial observer – a fashion or food critic – but a well-wisher, someone joyfully invested in the deeper meaning of the wedding, and able to enjoy the wedding as more than an occasion for eating and drinking.

Even in a society that seems to be irredeemably post-religious, and even in a ritual as superficially materialistic as the modern wedding, we instinctively understand there are certain things that have to be said. And not only because they are true, but because they connect us with something deeper than the merely true. The right words enhance our enjoyment of weddings, dinners and life in general because they affirm our humanity in all its beautiful mystery.  Thank the universe for that.