The Wisdom of Worship

I grew up thinking worship was an unenlightened vestige. I don't think so anymore.

One morning recently I was lying around, thinking about how our social-media-saturated culture traffics in superficial pathos. (As I was thinking about this, I was absently scrolling on Facebook, mind you, probably sharing animal videos.) We live in a culture with a great tendency to fixate on individual development and, I believe, to be in too much of a hurry to arrive. We traffic in memes and anthems, when we could be marinating and reflecting, because the anthems make us feel justified. They help us to feel like we’ve built ourselves in wise, satisfying ways. Meanwhile, without deeper wisdom to nourish us, people become proud, self-centered, armored; not only ignorant but protectively, defensively ignorant. You know what I mean?

It occurred to me, lying there, sharing animal videos, that what’s holding us back, in no small part, an inability to healthily admire. When there’s such an obsession with one’s own personal development, it can become irritating to see positive qualities in other people, because it’s immediately brought back to a lack in one’s self. The good in others gets reduced to another task — another way we have to stretch, and can’t quite. In the extreme, it can create strained, airless environments, where people are standing on tiptoe. I’ve found myself in a lot of places like this recently.

One of the ways out of this strained, airless experience, it seems to me, is actually through worship. It’s worth making some kind of distinction between “the world” and some form of higher, cosmic law, I feel, to see the world as a kind of social club that is, in a lot of ways, like the kind of social hierarchy one encounters in high school — and usually claws away from at the earliest opportunity. Trying to be made whole by the world is like trying to drink sea water. Far beyond, there are deeper systems with much more elaborate conceptions of wholeness. And some of the deepest access to some of the most authentic development occurs, I think, through encounter with phenomena so beyond us that we can’t but worship them.

Before I started attending an evangelical church several years ago (a lefty, progressive one), I’d not really given the idea of worship much thought. I’d thought it was something that only low-technology, non-industrial cultures did, for foolish reasons. It seemed unenlightened to me.

I hadn’t gone to an evangelical church to worship, personally; I’d gone to church with a handful of broken pieces. I held those pieces up to God, to see what would happen.

Other people went to this church to worship, though. When people sang to the contemporary Christian music in the service, they’d put their hands up, or put one hand in the air with the other hand on their heart. Certain times of year, the church offered an additional Wednesday service in which the band just played music for an hour. I atttended these, too. I remember distinctly one service where I opened my eyes and saw a young woman — a DC resident, almost certainly with a Master’s degree — on the floor of the church, on her knees, lying face down with her arms stretched out.

Experiences like these first got me thinking more seriously about worship. And over time, I’ve come to the conviction that a healthy openness to worship is really an essential aspect of human wholeness — which we’ve tended to abandon, at our peril, in modern life.

The divine can (probably) blow our minds

Around the time I started attending that progressive evangelical church, I also started coming across “other side” literature that talked about worship in the higher realms, and it helped me to understand that our imagination about divinity is frequently — perhaps always — too limited.

People who have had near-death experiences often talk about encountering divine beings who seem radiant, perfect, full of love. Sometimes, they talk about experiencing a pervasive ambience of love. Or a disembodied voice pregnant with gobsmacking love. Many people encounter Jesus, but certainly not everyone does. (Some of my favorite encounters with Jesus are Howard Storm’s in My Descent into Death and Betty Jean Eadie’s in Embraced by the Light.) People often describe being overwhelmed by the love of these beings. The term “explosion of love” is used more than once in near-death literature. In her near-death memoir, Waking Up in Heaven, Crystal McVea describes seeing a being that she recognizes as Jesus, and after seeing his light, love, and goodness, immediately falling to her knees and saying, “Why didn’t I do more for you?”

This, alone, begins to give the idea that we can be bowled over by the divinity of higher beings —and by extension, by a core divinity lies as the Source behind them. But at the same time that I was beginning to contemplate the idea of worship through my expriences in church, I also started reading accounts in which people experienced a divine radiance that was so radiant, so pure, and so good that it was actually unbearable, and this idea, though unsettling, helped me understand that even imagining things like “explosions of love” might be preliminry, and too limited.

People who’ve had NDEs quite often talk about seeing a light that is so bright that that they are sure that earthly eyes would be destroyed by the light, and that they could only perceive this light through the expanded spiritual vision of their discarnate selves. But sometimes folks encounter radiance that is even too much for them in their spiritual form. In her other-side narrative (rendered in updated language in the book, Nine Days in Heaven), Marietta Davis talks about being infused with a music that was so pure and beautiful that she felt she couldn’t bear it, and she cried out for help. Howard Storm talks about feeling unworthy of being in the presence of some of the angelic beings he encounters — and being told, matter-of-factly, that he does belong in their presence. Emmanuel Swedenborg, Marietta Davis, Chico Xavier (who purportedly channeled departed physician Andre Luiz), and many others talk, sometimes at great length, about the afterlife as being tiered. Beings gravitate to their level of spiritual comfort and development, they say, and there are, throughout, provisions for further spiritual transformation and growth — into deeper and deeper levels of divine experience, or deeper and deeper levels of return to God.

The idea that cosmic goodness can be so good that we’re actually alienated by it is disturbing to think about. But it’s worth noting that I’ve never read an account of someone having a divine experience that was too intense without there being some loving indication that there’s a plan. This has been one of the things that has really opened me to Christian notions of sanctification, in fact — though I feel like it’s hard to know for sure what’s going on on a cosmic level while we’re here in incarnation — and, if we’re being sincere enough about our jounery here, that that’s probably okay.

But if you really get unsetlled by the idea, I’d strongly encourage you to read Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich. “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well,” Julian assures us. I find her long commentary on this idea, based on her own visions, to be comforting and convincing.

In the meantime, I’m left with this: Anyone who believes in God can imagine that God is good. But I wonder how much time we spend thinking about the idea of ultimate good. Anyone can glibly say that God is love. But do we really try to get our heads and hearts around ultimate love? Not even a radiant being, but pure radiant being, so rarified that it drives us to our knees, like Crystal McVea?

In some “other side” accounts, it’s said that expressions of worship are spontaneous, because it’s the only ultimate way to participate in an encounter with the absolute. I imagine perfect mind, perfect heart, perfect being — larger than the universe. All good — all good — is proper to it, including any good in me, or any of us. The idea is that this goodness is so completely circumscribing that worship becomes the only available response.

I find this idea daunting, but compelling.

Long ago, I thought the whole idea of worship was based in an insufficiency of intellectual development. Now I really feel like that skepticism was based in a failure of my own imagination. I’ll bet there are things out there that could rock anyone’s world. I’ll bet there are experiences that would induce worship in any of us.

Worship as a gateway to growth

Inextrcaibly embedded in the concept of worship, of course, is the idea of subordination. (I’m hearing Wayne and Garth from Wayne’s World wailing, “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!” And now, maybe you are too.) But also, implicit in this subordination is the idea of transformation. Good worship is inherently adjacent to the concept of the worshipper being changed. Bowing down is not just an act of self-abnegation, it’s an act of self-abnegation that activates growth.

That relationship between worship and transformation is pretty universal, I think. In Vedanta, it’s implicit in the idea that bhakti, devotion, is a yoga — i.e., that devotion is a path to transformation and enlightenment. But I’m going to talk about it in primarily Christian terms, because I resonate with a particular, uncanny effectiveness in the Christ archetype. It may just be my prejudice; I try not to be stubborn about it.

These days, I tend to treat the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith somewhat separately. And even so, I find it remarkable how powerful the Christ archetype is. It is a way to worship the absolute, because it is the supposition that the absolure appears in a human form. So the Christ archetype reveals the nature of God, and a relationship with the Christ archetype is a relationship with God. Also, the Christ archteype offers a way to admire and subordinate oneself to an ultimate role model, in human form, without actually subjugating yourself to an actual person in real life, like a guru, who is almost certainly not worthy of that kind of devotion.

Of course, you don’t have to worship Christ, or Christian notions of God, to have this experience, I wouldn’t suppose. I just like this archetype particularly, so I talk about it in particular.

If we expect to worship, we are open to subordinating ourselves to something higher — which opens us to growth. Then, through the a divine archetype, we can relate to a powerful ideal. At the very least, it’s a useful abstraction. At best it is — as I believe it is — a window into a living reality, and an invitation to profound relationship.

Justification and santification

In the Christian tradition, then, once you begin to interact with the Christ archetype, you have a developing an identity in Christ. One’s sense of wholeness begins to shift from the politics of the high school lunchroom that is the world, and begins to be defined in much larger, cosmic terms — universal morality, timeless being, all-embracing love. We are almost sure to fall short of cosmic ideals, but I think it only takes a little bit of sincere approach toward the divine to see that the divine delights in our approach, that somehow all of this serves a purpose, and that our sincerity alone goes a long way to justifying us.

Then, further, there’s the idea of santification — that this divine begins to infuse us, that we are rendered more whole, partly through our own participation, but also through an agency beyond us that begins to work in us as well. We become enlarged and deepend through our willingness to be small. We become developed through bowing, worshipfully, to that which is beyond us. When that which we worship is sufficiently cosmic, and when our humility before it is sufficiently complete, what it begins to offer in return is a path to wholeness, itself.

Aren’t we always worshipping?

In a famous 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace observed that we’re always worshipping something. And if we’re not careful, that worship is a semi-conscious adoration of ambient, “default” things that people value — looks, power, status, intelligence.

I really think it’s worth digging into ourselves to pull this idea into view. Suppose that you are worshipping something. If it’s not God, what is it? Something worth worshipping? An idol?

“The compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship,” Wallace says, “be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

Again, there are probably many good ways to do it. In Christian practice, the endeavor is informed by the nature of Christ — a being, or maybe a state of being — that is demonstrably wholly bent toward the empowerment of all — serving, healing, washing feet. So when we bow down, in many ways the first thing Christ says in response is, “Stand up.” And from there, we are invited to serve, too, the way Christ does. It is humbling and uplifting at the same time, shrinking us and expanding at once. While we are humble and earthly, the divine in us is also evoked.

Herein, I think, is an essential element of healthy growth: I am convinced that no matter how knowledgable we become, how wise we become, how accomplished we become, that we are better if we still expect to be awe-stricken by the ground of reality. Talk of divine glory feels old-school. But I think that glory is real, and that its fullest apprehension may never cease to overwhelm us somehow.

How can we not be exceeded by the absolute? How can it not flood and defy even the best of our inner and outer frames, or language? How can it not bring us, in some ways, to our knees — rendering us gloriously, joyfully undone?

Knowing that we can be so undone — and seeking intimacy with the conscious ground that is our undoing — we can toddle off toward truth, primed for expansion, with a humbling measure of ourselves. That’s a good way, if you ask me.

When we worship, what do we worship? When we imagine the absolute, what do we imagine? Is it marvelous? Is it marvelous enough? Can we make it even more marvelous?

What does it do for us, if we do? What does it do to us, if we do?

I believe worship is wise.