Worship: A Practice in Mystery
Worship happens when we seek outside ourselves. We can easily worship that which is greater than us because we can't comprehend it. Once we comprehend something, it loses its awe and its mystery, even its fear. It becomes quite ordinary and manageable. If we were to comprehend God, he would no longer be great, nor even our equal, but in fact, beneath us. Manageable.
Isn't that what we all want? Isn't that the origin of sin; to manage everything, to know everything and be in control? Hasn't mankind done a marvelous job at expelling God from the mind, discrediting Him as a story for children, pushing Him out of serious intelligent thought because science cannot comprehend Him, instruments cannot measure Him, observations cannot see Him? Don't we take that which we don't understand and twist it and morph it into something, either terrible and abhorable, or something silly and dismissible? Then we can fight it with just cause or ignore it with dignity.
Isn't it easier to replace what we don’t understand with something that we totally understand? It is far safer to worship what is created because we can grasp its limits. We can stretch or confine the boundary of its mystery, we control the elevation of its eminence. We know then we can control. It's safer to put your faith in a person or a object or an ideal. It has boundaries that can be reached by your mind. No surprises. No demands on you beyond its own capacity. Worship then is limited as well. Worship then is bound, closed off once its capacity has been filled. Worship then is subject to boredom and routine.
However, with God, only with God, can one partake in true worship. Because God is incomprehensible, there are surprises of true worship around every corner, behind every object, within every person! Every single thing He has created is the grounds for the becomings of the most beautiful worship when used as a launching pad into His Immeasurable Fullness and not the destination of it. Every created being has this incredible opportunity to not only see these glimpses of the Creator wherever they look or in whatever their function is, but more so, have a direct line to the Creator himself, a piece of him within themselves that swells and moves, that pulls back to him like a magnet, that bubbles like hot magma and churns about with in us; a piece of Him that longs to go home, longs to unite with those around him, longs to be whole again and under one roof. It is that which is in us already, the likeness, that continually surprises us, continually moves us, continually changes us, and continually calls us onward and toward home.
When we suppress the likeness that is within us, we suppress the likeness that is around us. We become immovable, dead stones, we become lost and alone. We move out of our hearts and into our heads, where we can know it all and control everything. We worship our own minds as the greatest being and highest power, and in doing so, limit our experience of life to poor reflections of immeasurable grandeur.
I pray for those who are blind to You Lord. Who have refused to leave the prison of their minds. Who sit in the darkness of their lonely cell in fear and anger towards a God that won't be managed, who can't be understood. Who have reasoned with themselves and have been content to hold a flickering flame as their source of light and warmth when you would freely give them all the light of the sun. I pray for those who see only shadows of truth, never beholding the source. I pray for those who want, so desperately, to worship in spirit and in truth, that they may see you and face you and behold your beauty. That they may be living stones and that your spirit in them might be united.
(Journal entry from February 2017)