Worship
Worship
In my study at home, I have an old Anglican prayer bench. It is my place of refuge. It is where I come on my knees before God and open my heart in its most deeply felt struggles and needs. If you had told me as a young lad going to church that someday I would long for a prayer bench, I would have despaired even more than I already did. Kneeling in worship and being aware of others kneeling beside me was not exactly the highlight of my week. I would covertly glance out the corner of my eye to see what others were doing. Worship was nothing more than a word in my vocabulary. I saw prayer and the repetition of creeds as nothing more than a hypnotic effort at inducing some state of mind. It mattered little, except at examination time and in times of crisis. It was a sort of “God, if you are there, please help.” Now, in my adult years, I have seen more happen during my time of prayer than any other time.
The hunger for worship is one of the greatest clues in life. In India, temples are full, and the whole cultic experience of priests, ceremonies, chants, blessings, fears, and superstitions is all part and parcel of the culture. You grow up knowing and accepting that “religion” is a vital part of a person’s life. The interesting thing is that we seldom ask the questions that ought to be asked. Why? It seems that whatever ceremonies we are taught become part of our personal culture, a habit of the heart and an expression of our community. More often than not religious rites are performed out of fear or superstition. And they are seldom questioned or examined.
Growing up, I noticed many culturally meaningful things that several of my friends did. One was to touch the feet of the father of the family to show respect. This was a very admirable and beautiful act to watch. Each time the father would enter the room or the son or daughter would bid their father good-bye before heading on a journey, they would lean over and touch his feet as a sign of respect, and there would be a quick ceremonial blessing given by the father to his children. I had a very dear classmate who devoutly followed that practice. But I noticed something. The ceremony had become nothing more than that and did not reflect any true reality. In his private life, his values were anything but honoring to his father. What was even more tragic was a day that I remember well, when this young man doused himself with kerosene and lit a match to his body. When his parents came home, it was to find his charred body. What did this say to the parents? The son who had touched his father’s feet in respect and the father who had given his blessing to his son really didn’t know the other or what the other was thinking. All the formality and ceremony had amounted to nothing.
This is the ultimate violation of worship. All the ceremonies in the world, all the perfunctory reverence, do not make for worship. Worship that is properly understood and properly given is co-extensive with life… It informs all of life, everything we do and everything we say and think. At its core it is the sense and service of God. Worship brings into confluence all the questions and answers that we have and do not have. For the answers we do not have, a relationship with the One who does have them carries us through. It is the submission of our will, heart, and purpose to the sovereign will and the person of God who created us and loves us. Worship is a relationship from which all inspiration flows and the relationship through which all of our needs are met. It is knowing even partly the One who knows us fully.
Worship of the Supreme Being is what makes it possible to find unity in diversity in the world around me by enabling me to find unity and diversity within myself, first. Worship is the starting point.
Once you understand essence, existence, and reverence in the context of a relationship expressed in stewardship and worship, life’s purpose becomes clear. From that come beneficence and the imperatives. Then love can be legitimately defined; otherwise, it is nothing more than a word that is open to each person’s own interpretation and context. Then legitimate pleasure can be defined; otherwise, all pleasure is up for grabs.
The purpose of life given by my Creator is both general and specific. It is general in that we all are designed to have the sacred as a starting point in everything. This even means that the notion of truth is a sacred trust. It is specific in that love has its boundaries. When Oprah said that she couldn’t conceive of God being jealous, she betrayed her warped definition of love. God is not jealous because he wants us to himself as a private possession, he is jealous because he wants us to have the supreme experience of love, which, contrary to the implications of the pluralistic religions, is exclusive. It is the nature of love to bind itself. Love is not free. Someone who truly loves another cannot be other than jealous for the object of their love.
Some time ago, I saw a special program on the progress that is being made in the development of artificial limbs. While I was awed by the incredible mechanical genius of giving a person arms and legs, there was something else that could have been easily missed. Two who had received these prosthetics and were able to stand up from their wheelchairs said something that was totally unexpected: “It is so wonderful to be able to hug and be hugged again.” Who would have thought of that except someone who had been in a wheelchair and was unable to hug or be hugged because of the intrusion of the chair?
God embraces us with his love and has given us the extraordinary privilege of love and sexuality in a relationship from which God has exempted himself because he is “Spirit”; his love for us is so great that he has provided for us to have pleasure in our material finitude. And he makes that same body his dwelling place, his temple.
To be sure, the New Spirituality loves to talk of the sacred, or of purpose and meaning, but the starting point of an impersonal absolute without any of the attributes of God, except by negation, does not justify the New Spiritualists’ participation in the categories they like to talk about. In doing away with God and deifying themselves, they have actually ended up losing the personal self as well. We are, in effect, amputated, because there is no one to embrace or to be embraced by. We are alone in a world where everything is nothing and we are part of the divine. From the Judeo-Christian perspective, humanity is the supreme creation of a personal, loving God. That starting point allows values and imperatives that find their definitions in a personal God.