More 'Just Thinking' Pieces
Worship?
"Let us worship.”
We stand.
Or bow. Or kneel. Or prostrate ourselves. To Him. Or Her. Or Them.
It is a being, a person (“In sprit form,” you trip over yourself to say, but a being still). He/She/It understands and converses, caresses, and commands as a being, like us. But better.
And yes, we call it God to spiritify it. But being it is – a responder, a guide, demanding, correcting, banishing, loving, judging, excluding, including, blessing. “A being who…” we say. And envision.
We say “God said” and “God gave” and “God rested” and “God wept and "God loves.”
Clearly we worship a being.
Or do we?
Maybe not. Isn’t it an idea we worship? Don’t we worship the core idea that the god/being embodies, personifies, mouths, promises, requires?
Aren’t we first attracted to that idea and then to whatever god/being is purveyor of that idea?
Take your favourite God. Imagine it. Now imagine it without a single idea. Would you worship it?
Doubtful. Why would you? Surely there is nothing as useless as a God with no message. Just a sitting-around-the-pool-gin-and-tonic God? Unlikely.
More likely it is the God’s ideas, most especially its core idea, that attract us; and it is that idea that we use to proselytise. It is that core idea that creates crusades and builds cities and cloisters people for the rest of their lives.
Again, what is your favourite God? If it is the Christian God (the only one I know anything about), the core idea that attracted you is probably that the prophet-God Jesus was crucified so that if you follow Him, you will have a happy eternal life. As opposed to a tortured one. He went through temporary torture so that we could be spared eternal torture. That is an astonishing idea. (I’ve never quite understood why He was required to do that, why, given how perfect He was, He could not just have been granted a happy eternal life and then blessed us with that, too, but what do I know?)
My guess is that if you took away that idea of Jesus’s sacrifice for your happy eternal life, you would not be all that interested in the God who said it nor the Jesus who suffered the pain.
And if it is Jesus himself you worship, you probably would not bother if He hadn’t said all the things He said about love and inclusion and justice and forgiveness and modesty and, yes, an eternal (happy) life.
Who would Jesus be without those ideas?
In fact, some scholars say that people who claim that there is “evidence” of a man called “Jesus” in the Middle East around the time that the Bible was cobbled together in Nicaea 400 years after Jesus in the summer of 395 are wrong. But the ideas ascribed to Him are so compelling, they needed to be preserved and the best way to preserve a set of good ideas is to put them into the mouth of a singular amazing being. Enter Jesus. And there they are still for us all to study and try to embody.
For the moment, then, I propose we consider that it is not Jesus we worship; it is His Ideas.
So now can we worship? Is that form of worship okay?
I don’t think so.
I would guess that worshipping is never okay. Not even of ideas so exhilarating, so exalting, so radical, so demanding, so complex we collapse from their complexity, so nearly impossible to execute we usually give up, ideas so wondrous they surely merit our worship?
Not even then. Because when we peer into any human life and find worship, we find obedience. And when we find obedience, we find abdication of independent thought. And well, you don’t have to be a historian to know where that can lead. Ask any Jew.
So I propose we stop worshipping. That we start considering. That we start wondering, and noticing, and asking, and letting our brains – this most wondrous of all wondrous things – do what their design allows them to do: think, feel, speak.
Let us get up off the floor; let us rise from the kneeler; let us open our eyes; turn to each other and ask, “What do you think, or feel, or want to say?” Let us listen reverently to each other equally, and then praise each other and life itself before we say amen and vow to return.
Let us – think.
To Be
Get the trucks off the road.
Get the road off the road.
Get off the road.