I have to admit, as a man, an introvert, a Calvinist, and one whose emotional shadow doesn’t seem to match my shape, the idea of worship makes my nostrils squinch. It doesn’t really fit into any category I can dissect or observe from a distance. You don’t know what it’s like to drive that car until you hop in and punch the gas. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to get buckled in next to the gal with the weepy grin, softly swaying, hands holding an invisible beach ball overhead and singing in a strange key.
But I confess the problem is with me. There I sit in the worship service with a Holden Caufield squint, feeling like a phoney and assuming everyone else is too. If people were to look at me they might think I am taking a knee or having a spiritual “time out”, like God an me got some things to work out. The truth is, I just don’t get it.
You can’t understand worship through dissection, just like you can’t know what a cat is by inspecting the organs and splaying open the fur. What a cat is – the coy, aloof, lazy huntress that always looks like you just asked it to pick you up from the airport – cannot be discovered by such means. You must experience. So is worship.
Books have been written on this. I have read none of them. But I did ask God a few days back, in a fit of curiosity and plain old dumbfoundery – what is it I am doing when I worship? He answered me today. Took longer than I expected; perhaps he has been shipping answers USPS to cut costs.
I was reading Psalm 27, perhaps my fav. Here is the functional portion:
One thing I ask from the Lord,
this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the Lord
and to seek him in his temple.
Psalm 27:4
Now I am not going to make some sweeping statement that this is the definition of worship or anything. Definitions are necessary and good but also tend to have as their means of inscription stone and chisel, and something tells me a concept as living and active as worship would get a bit fitful trapped in carbonite.
But I will say that this verse is to me a large part of worship. To dwell in the house of the Lord is a destination of worship. The closer I get to God the more real I become. A similar sentiment exists in CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce where the specters of Greytown, ghostly and near invisible in the reality of heaven, become solid, visible and real as they dwell in the celestial fields.
And what preoccupies me as I dwell? I gaze on beauty. One of the curious things about beauty is that you don’t do anything with it but gaze. The moment you take beauty and put it in your pocket it ceases to be beautiful; it becomes a trinket, a possession. The sublimity of a sunset is wrung of its pith when it becomes a picture. Beauty fills us up; it is gracious in this way. It is an end in itself.
To inquire in his temple implies to be answered there too, and the inquiries are on another level of mere knowledge. I’m not looking for facts. I have no interest in trivia. To inquire in His temple is to meditate on Yahweh, the Ancient of Days, and to have Him fill your mind with wonder – which is what worship is.
So that is my answer. I may still not stand and sing during worship (especially with some of the real stinker worship songs penned nowadays) but what I am doing is being filled up with beauty and wonder, becoming more real, more myself, more like Him.
Thought Butter 