Prayer and Worship

We engage in spontaneous prayer when we call to God in our distress—or when, in moments of sudden gladness or relief, we thank God without any thought or reservation in an overflow of gratitude.

It seems to me that worship belongs in another category. Our closest experience of worship is to fall in love—and the younger we are, the closest the approximation. Young love is still unaware of sexuality and the feeling is therefore pure. We adore the other in a mute and astonished state of veneration. If in our coarse adulthood we would become even vaguely aware of the Sublime, we would all sink to our knees in helpless worship—our freedom of will suspended. We get closer to this state, worship, when some aspect of the divine actually touches us—channeled, you might say, by some great work of art, usually music. But here as in all things a certain adequacy must be present.

Worship in the usual sense is a kind of mimesis of something we believe in but don’t actually feel—except on extraordinarily rare occasions, briefly. Great music, fine arts, colorful ceremonies, inspiring words: all these are harnessed to make our worship meaningful. But our worship is nevertheless—no matter how emotional—an imitation, an acting out. Worship is something above the emotions. I’m fairly sure that we are actually shielded from the great fire of the divine. If we saw it without any veiling, we would be consumed. What we do see is the veiling. Therefore it is right and proper to behold God behind the beautiful, the majestic, the glorious, and the sublime—when phenomena that support these words appear. They are reflections of something transcending mere mountains, oceans, spring meadows, newborn infants, vast clouds in the blue sky, sunsets, and subtle dawns.

If worship isn’t anchored in our inner core, it’s only a social drill. But I approve of social drill. I see ourselves, society, culture, in fact the whole cosmos as manifesting ascending layers. Social drill is an appropriate activity at a certain level. It reminds us, habituates us, it molds our behavior—and experience teaches. Formal worship tills the soil, you might say, so that something in that soil might sprout. Worship at the high level will come spontaneously—and will not be felt as an obligation in the least—when our inner being has gained the power to behold.

Prayer is closer to us. It springs up from personal need or the release of tension in gratitude. It is an almost instinctive reaching out to an impossible—because invisible—agency for help. We can label this motion of the self as an illusion or, alternatively, ponder whether, perhaps, it is a dim but innate knowledge that our current state is incomplete. Reduced to pure concept, prayer is an acknowledgement of a dimension higher and beyond ours. In prayer we attend to it. We think of attention as “looking at, listening to,” but I’ve come to think of it as a much more potent power, one that transcends the physical (eyes, ears). Here is an instance of the subtle power of attention on this side of the divide: Sometimes when we watch someone intently from behind, someone at quite some distance from us, that person may turn and looks at us. The distance may be quite extensive. Our attention, especially when it is intense (“fervent prayer”) may really open a channel by means of which grace flows our way. In this context the last three quotes of yesterday’s post are relevant. Each emphasizes our state—and what it must be to have our prayer answered.

Someone might object to my take here by saying that I’m playing with fields of energy (“channel opens,” “grace flows”—pure pantheism). They would insist that God is a person, not some electromagnetic field writ large. I agree, actually. The last thing I want to do is to reduce the high to the low. But those who picture God as Mom or Dad writ large are engaged in the same process of reduction. I have no idea how to picture God. What I do know is that in my prayers, I do address a person. But my own experience also bears out that “fervent” or “heartfelt” prayer has a certain quality—and one’s experience of some kind of response depends on this intensity, an intensity I don’t think can be faked. Alternatively, prayer may be deep, but on that subject in a future post. In either case, the model that occurs to me is that we face a shielding which our act of prayer penetrates, be it by intensity or deep inner silence. It is a genuine contact. I also think that all such prayers are always answered—although we may lack the capacity to understand the answer. It may simply be a very slight improvement of our powers of understanding; it may be the removal of one tiny grain of our thick stupidity. Prayer isn’t magic. If it were, the world would be on its knees day and night.