A Person Will Worship Something REVISED 8-6-06

Martha Hodges - 2006-03-26

"A person will worship something – have no doubt about that.

We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts – but it will out.

That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character.

Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshiping, we are becoming."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The idea of “worship” is one that sets many Unitarian Universalist teeth on edge. For some committed to our tradition of free thought and rationalism, it may call to mind idolatry and superstition; prostrating oneself before an image. For others, it suggests submissiveness and self-abnegation; proclaiming one’s unworthiness in a craven attempt to mollify a vengeful god, or begging or bargaining with a capricious deity. It may conjure up rites of unthinking emotionalism or the rote recitation of words that have lost their meaning, the observance of empty ritual. Perhaps there’s an element of hubris in the reaction of some of us to this word; perhaps we think of worship as something only the uneducated or tradition-bound engage in, something for the great unwashed, the “opiate of the masses.” Above all, the word “worship” may imply devotion to a supernatural being that many of us cannot or do not care to believe in. After all, how can you worship without worshiping some thing or some one?

But Emerson opens up to us a broader understanding of worship. He suggests that the object of worship is whatever “dominates our thoughts and imaginations” and, since we all have these, worship is an inevitable quality of the human condition. I wonder what, in Emerson’s terms, you worship. What dominates your thoughts and imagination? To have the answer to this truly is to know a person’s life and character.

And as a people, what dominates our thoughts and imaginations determines our collective character. By what shall this character, this shared life be shaped? The object of worship, Emerson admonishes us, is a matter of choice, and a critical one.

Ours is a religion of ideas. Reason is the ultimate test of the worthiness of our beliefs and choices. For some of us then, reason itself or the human intellect is what we worship. Growing up in an academic environment, this was the object of worship I learned to admire – the measure of a person’s life and character. My adult life has brought about a shift in my values, by the way. That is why I am now a minister rather than an academic. As a teacher, I grew so frustrated by the limits of reason! I used to teach college students about social injustices, but I felt inhibited by my worship of reason – inhibited about asking the ultimate questions of my students, such as, “Why should we care about any of this stuff – poverty, racism, fairness?

For many, this is what occupies their thoughts and imaginations – visions of a more just world, a world in which human behavior is guided by devotion to an ethic of justice. Closely related is the worship of love and compassion. For others it is science or nature. For still others, it is human potential for creating and loving beauty.

These are all worthy objects of worship, and it is no coincidence that they are all what some understand as the divine: reason, justice, love, nature, or beauty.

But these are all concepts. Must our worship be limited to what we can think and imagine? Or might it be something even more powerful – even more transformative – than ideas? Might worship be something that is created and experienced at a more primal level – a more universal level? Could it be something more ambitious, more encompassing? Could it possibly fulfill needs that ideas alone cannot?

People come to church for many reasons, but not least among these is the sense that something is lacking in their lives. Something that we often have difficulty putting into words. For believers in God, this emptiness has been described as a god-shaped hole within us that we seek to fill. For those of us who reject the idea of a personal or supernatural god, what is the shape of this hole – for it is most certainly there – and how can this emptiness be filled? Can it be filled with ideas alone?

We may attempt to fill it with creature comforts and luxuries; we may try to fill it with addictions of one kind or another; with work and the sense that our work is important, even vital. Many of us try to fill it with the love of family and family obligations, with friends or lovers. Some people love structure; others worship personal freedom. We’re all familiar with the worship of power, sex, and money and the unhappy consequences they tend to breed. But, truly, it’s not for me or you to judge whether or not any of these are worthy choices; that is a matter for each person to decide on his or her own. But we can look at the consequences of these choices. Not only, are they harmful to others, but do they satisfy? And if Emerson is correct, if what we worship is what we become, are these worthy objects? Worthy ideals on which to model ourselves? And yet, if we hunger for something more than ideas to fill that emptiness at our centers, what else might it be – especially if we are incapable of believing in or worshiping a personal deity?

Perhaps the kind of soul-satisfying worship I’m talking about involves more than thinking and more than self-indulgent emotionalism. Perhaps we need it to be more than an intellectual activity and also more than a thoughtless ritual. Why can’t worship be bigger than one or the other? Maybe that emotional or non-rational component that is so off-putting to many of us and so essential to the world’s religions deserves a closer look.

I once attended a service at a Unitarian Universalist church in Chicago called the Church of the Open Door. This is a church that was established by an African American lesbian couple with the intent of serving this group of doubly marginalized people – lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people of color. Attending worship that afternoon – for services were held at 4 PM, an idea I would enthusiastically endorse, by the way – attending worship that afternoon was a fascinating and moving experience for me. The service was a blend of UU message and Pentecostal Christianity. It bore some UU trappings – the Purposes and Principles were printed on the Order of Service – but these ideas were clothed in the forms of worship found in the traditional black Christian churches of America.

What moved me about this experience was the realization that the people present there that day, myself included, were different when they left the sanctuary than they had been when they had entered. In other words, something had happened to them during the hour and a half of worship. They had participated in something transformative. They had experienced an encounter with the Divine. There was music, prayer, tears and exhortation, embraces and confessions. The sermon was intelligent and subtle and provocative, but soul-stirring as it was, it was secondary to the personal testimonials, the altar call and the music – the highly personal yet collective work – the spiritual work that the people of the church did together.

I left church that day at once inspired and discouraged. Inspired because I had seen a vision of what worship could be, and discouraged because I knew that I, for one, could never fully embrace such worship. For one thing, I knew that I could never preach with such power. And more than that, I could never embrace the meaning of the suffering Jesus that was at its heart. I was discouraged by this question: Is it possible for all of our UU churches to offer an experience of worship? Not necessarily in that particular form or with that particular theology. But does the Unitarian Universalist message, stripped of the Christian story from which it evolved, have anything to offer that is truly transformative? Something deserving of worship? I wondered if worship in our theologically diverse and, for the most part, heady, congregational cultures could do what I saw happen that day in the Church of the Open Door. Could our worship experience reach out to people and grab them, move them, shake them to their very souls and then set them down again in a place of love and affirmation, ready to return to the workaday world, stronger and more whole? Better prepared to face the difficulties of the coming week with integrity and passion?

I continue to struggle with this question. As a humanist, I know that the Christian story, in all its power, is not my story. I know that my personal style is somewhat less than exuberant. As I’ve shared with you, my background is academic, with all the restraints and constraints on emotion and personal expression, all the fears of looking foolish, that that implies. So how could I be authentically myself and yet experience a kind of worship that was heart-felt and real? More important, how can our UU congregations as a whole remain true to themselves and still move beyond the dry lecture hall tradition that many of us are so comfortable with, but that leaves our souls untouched? Can we reconcile the love of ideas with the human need – the religious need – for something fresher, more nourishing, something real and juicy – something more life-giving?

I wonder if we dare to invite an encounter with the Holy, however we understand that?

Do we dare to give up our safe role of spectator at Sunday morning service, to become co-creators of a shared experience of communion? I know I seek communion in worship, communion with my deepest and most authentic self, communion with those sitting around me, communion with Ultimate Reality, with life itself. Such a communion could carry us through our lives, inspiring us to dream larger and more loving dreams, to speak more truthfully and lovingly and to act with greater integrity and compassion. Do we dare to be comforted and inspired by this sense of connection or are we UUs interested only in becoming better informed?

I believe that communion, this antidote to our essential loneliness is one reason that we need churches, and worship. I believe that one aspect of communion that we human beings especially need is the experience of reverence. Reverence is, after all, a kind of love, and love is part of what makes us human.

Reverence, or a sense of awe respect, and wonder, is closely related to humility – another salutary human experience. A deeply felt sense that we are not the center of the universe, that there is more mystery in us and around us than our human minds, marvelous as they are, can encompass. The powerful realization that we are limited and the equally powerful sense of relief that we are not in control of the universe, of other people, or even, at times, of ourselves – and that that’s all right, because life will go on even so.

An awareness of grace and the practice of gratitude are more reasons that we humans need worship. Belief in grace, the unmerited and unearned gifts of life, does not require belief in a god that dispenses salvation at his pleasure. It simply requires opening our senses to the beauty of the earth, to the challenges of loving, to the miracle of human creativity. Along with the practice of gratitude, it makes us glad to be alive, even in moments of pain. By grace, our lives are rich and beautiful. By gratitude, we acknowledge this.

And hope. Worship restores hope in our potential to be whole, to make a difference in the lives of others, to find meaning in our work and our relationships. Hope that we will learn to love ourselves, that we will find ourselves deserving of forgiveness and compassion. Worship – good worship – affirms our worth. And, doubting creatures that we are, we need this affirmation and this hope.

Can Unitarian Universalist worship give us all this: communion, reverence, humility, grace, gratitude, hope and affirmation? I fervently hope so. But not if we expect church to be entertainment, if we expect to be passive auditors. These are inner experiences. The Sunday service can provide a framework, but the work is yours, the congregation’s.

Today we are experimenting with the form of worship – this framework – as a possible entry into this kind of religious experience. Today I chose to return to a form of worship that was practiced in the Unitarian Church of my childhood – a liturgy that was developed in the 1920s by a Unitarian minister named Van Ogden Vogt. Now, there is much in Vogt’s ideal of worship that would not fly today. A formality and level of abstraction that would ring false today and would not satisfy our expectations and preferences for a style more spontaneous and intimate.

Liturgy means “the work of the people.” Unitarian Universalism has grown away from the liturgical tradition, though we retain a few elements of liturgy – the lighting of the chalice, the singing of hymns (however reluctantly) and an occasional responsive reading.

The reasons for breaking with a purely liturgical tradition are sound ones. Many of you grew up in liturgical traditions, as Catholics or Episcopalians or Jews or Lutherans, and can perhaps attest to the ease with which ritual can empty of meaning or be employed in manipulative ways. But many people raised in such traditions have also spoken to me of missing the ritual of their childhood religions – not the specific rituals, but the presence of ritual in the worship service and the experience of something spiritual, something beyond simple intellect, that ritual makes possible.

Ritual and liturgy have a purpose and invaluable function in our lives. They are reassuring, yes, because they become, with use, familiar and reliable. But more than that, they are capable of marking off a certain time and place as special – as sacred, if you will.

Today I asked you to enter this space quietly in order to experience this place as sanctuary – a place set apart for spiritual work and spiritual rest.

Van Ogden Vogt’s liturgical model is only one of many I might have chosen, but what his and several others that inspired him have in common is movement. His idea was that the outer movement from one worship element to the next guides the inner experiences of the worshipers along parallel paths. His model takes us from the experience of the One, the transcendent, to the experience of the many, the self, and back again. This sense of the universal and the realization of the particular alternate in a rhythmic sequence.

Vogt saw that worship is nothing more or less than a celebration of life, of reality, a process of re-connecting with the fundamental goodness of life. Of re-connecting with what some call God or the divine; what for others is simply that which they hold most high and most worthy of devotion. And this process of re-connection is deeply satisfying.

Worship, says Vogt, is an art form. Like any art form, it mediates our encounter with reality. The form of worship, as art, should enhance and enlarge the imagination and “fit the mind for the exercise of its highest power.” And, as art, worship should be enjoyable.

Far from denigrating the intellect, worship of this kind with its ritual and liturgy, says Vogt “frees the mind from its accustomed channels and preoccupations and prejudices.” It allows us to feel and to think. There are not, after all, all that many new ideas. But worship lets us experience old ideas afresh and draw new meaning and inspiration from them.

So we find ourselves back where we began, with Emerson’s admonition to be careful what we worship, for what dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives and character. Vogt likewise warns us that “whatever a person celebrates is in a sense his religion, but it is usually a very meager religion.”

Our Unitarian Universalist religion is our communal celebration of what each of us separately holds most dear and worthy of self-dedication. Our worship together is the celebration not of individual truths but of truth seeking. In Vogt’s words, the idea without form is “a timid tapping that does not rouse the sleepy householder; clad in good form – worshipful form – it blows a bugle at the gates of the soul.”

Emerson tells us that it “behooves us to be careful what we worship.” I would add – “and how we worship” – for the what and the how are inseparable. We all worship something. May your worship honor your best ideas and holiest needs; may you hear the bugle and may the gates of your soul swing wide.