This past winter, over coffee and a discussion about worship, Marie Reed, Chair of the Worship Committee, asked me if I would do a worship service this summer about some of the things I had just said about worship. I said yes and by the end of spring when the worship committee was putting together the summer schedule, neither of us quite remembered the specifics of the conversation. "Something about UUCR as a worshipping community," remembered Marie. I do want to focus on communal worship. Personal, individual worship may share some of the same characteristics as communal worship, but it is our worship as a community that is the context for my reflections.
I want to talk briefly about three things–what is universal in worship, a definition of worship, and challenges for Unitarian Universalists in worship.
What is universal in worship? I don’t mean the outer forms or rituals of worship; rather what is universal about the human experience of and motivation for worship, regardless of ritual or theology? For me, it is Connection and Transformation. Connection to a deeper part of ourselves, to others, to that which is greater than our selves. Transformation toward a better self, toward more clearly defining and more fully living our values. Transformation of our relationships with others, toward more compassion, forgiveness, justice, and kindness in our relationships. Transformation of our relationship with life, with the rhythms and cycles of life, with that which we call holy in life.
Loretta LaRoche, not a theologian, but a comedian (so maybe a theologian after all), published a book last year about modern stress. What she says about our human nature relates to what I mean by connection and she has an interesting idea on how we learn to love ourselves that I want to read to you. She writes:
We’re told ‘you can’t love another until you learn to love yourself.’ ... The truth is often just the opposite: You can learn to love yourself by loving other people! By becoming part of a larger group you can learn not only about your place in the world, but you can learn how much other people care about you, and therefore how worthy of love you are. How can you ever really feel that you’re lovable until there are many other people who love you? How can you really feel that you're worth caring about until there are many other people caring about you? It's only when you’re part of a thriving, intimate, intense community that you can understand and feel good about how worthwhile you are.
Human beings are tribal animals! We crave intimacy and connection. It’s in the genes. ... We need other people; we need close relationships and community and family not only for our psychological health, but for physical health, too. [She describes some studies demonstrating the link between health and having bonds with others.] ...
...the thing that is great about human relationships is that you never know where the value is going to come from. You never know when the surprise insight will come your way–or from whom. At any minute of any day, another person may touch your life with a moment of laughter, joy, pathos, friendship, intelligence, rage, fear or pure love. Intensity of life comes from those moments. ...
We’ve got to do everything we can to rejoin the human community, to connect ourselves to the people around us in ways that allow us to be truly touched. We must allow ourselves to become part of the messy, inefficient, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes wonderful, but always intense and engaging world of humanity.
It’s only when we really open ourselves up, figuratively opening the doors and letting everyone into our kitchens [this is a reference to her memories of her grandmother’s kitchen and groups of neighbors always congregating there], that we can appreciate not only what a luminous place the world is, but how important a part we play in it.
"Each and every one of us," she writes, "has the ability to create a better life" for ourselves ... "always, ALWAYS choose the path that leads you towards a deeper connection with other people."
When we gather for worship we affirm the truth of our human need for connection. We affirm this truth among people with whom we covenant to care for, to be engaged with, to support, to receive from, to touch and to be touched by. It is our gathering for worship and our covenant with one another that is far more important and powerful than any of our specific practices, rituals, or traditions.
What is worship? In 1998 sociologist Robert Bellah gave a talk at General Assembly in which he said, "Worship as I understand it is worship of something." For Bellah, worship of something is the defining aspect of worship. I think many people share this idea of worship. However, the word worship comes from weorth, meaning worthy or worth, and -scipe, the suffix -ship from scieppan, meaning to shape. Barbara Marshman, a UU religious educator, and other UUs have defined worship as "the consideration of things of the greatest worth." This UU definition is the one I find most meaningful. I had never looked up the suffix -ship before and was interested to see that it comes from a word meaning to shape. In our worship we lift up and reflect upon things of the greatest worth and we also shape what is of worth.
How do we do worship; how do we consider the things of greatest worth and consider them in such a way that the possibilities for connection and transformation are optimal? Unitarian minister and scholar, Von Ogden Vogt, wrote in his classic book, The Primacy of Worship,
Primary in all religions are the positive, free, voluntary acts of the spirit of [a human] in the presence of [one’s] total good. This is worship. This is true irrespective of what terms describe that good, true alike for theist or humanist or naturalist. The very words used to denote common worship testify to this view of religious action. ... From the point of view of concrete, historical religion, the central thing in religion is religious action. Even Protestantism uses the word service of worship, meaning not a thought or a feeling but a deed.
He quotes Evelyn Underhill, who writes of three choices by which people may "unite in a common act of worship." Her three choices are (1) "silence which unites" all of the separate acts of worship, (2) the acts of worship which "can be performed by the leader ... in the name of all", (3) the ritual or liturgy that all present can take some part in doing.
Vogt writes about seven acts of public or communal worship. The first is an act of attention, such as a call to worship, which assists the worshipper in a deliberate turning of the mind away from the everyday to the universal.
The second is an act of penitence, perhaps a prayer, meditation, or part of the sermon, which leads the worshipper to an honest self-examination and recognition of, as he says, "our personal guilt and the guilt we share for the wrongs of our times." For Vogt, a crucial part of the act of penitence is not only recognizing our guilt but being called to our goodness. He says, "There can be no acknowledgment of wrong except for a precedent knowledge of the right ... It is only when the spirit of goodness is wakened that contrition and confession follow. No one feels humble or guilty merely by deciding to do so. We are rendered humble by the presence of magnitude, and penitent by the presence of divine goodness in God or [a human being]."
The third act of our communal worship is an act of praise. For Vogt, praise is central to why we come to church and an "all but universal action of religion." We come to express our gratitude for the blessings and richness of life. He goes so far as to say that "No religious service can be good without an ample action of thanksgiving, a hymn or anthem of praise or one of the great Psalms of praise read responsively."
The fourth act is an act of recollection which, at its heart, is the mystic experience of movement from the many to the One and is "the birthplace of change." The act of recollection, Vogt says, is "an attempt to bring together all the factors and forces of life for survey and review, to view and review and re-review all things. It is the effort to collect and recollect all our knowledge and experience and speculation, ... to re-examine faiths, to clarify ideas and values, to select purposes, to look upon everything in relation to everything else."
The fifth act is an act of faith. "Whatever we see to be of greatest value," Vogt says, "those become our faiths, those become the immediate guides for life." Vogt suggests that this act "may be the very climax of the whole service," leading the worshipper’s thoughts once more to the presence of the universal and preparing the worshipper to return to common life ready to "express the spirit of goodness in personal responsibility."
The sixth act is an act of dedication. Vogt writes, "All recognize the necessity for self-consecration. It is the final inner acceptance of responsibility and commitment of the self to the right and good. ... It is the inner action that is precedent to every outer and overt act of virtue."
Vogt’s seventh act is an act of communion. He says that the whole action of public, or communal, worship is an act of communion. "Togetherness is essential to the highest life of" humans, he states.
What would you say are the critical elements, acts, rituals, necessary for our communal worship? When Martin Marty, theologian and American church historian, was asked what he did for his own worship, he replied without hesitation, "I go and sit in a church of the faith of my childhood." He went on to say that, even though we may move far from the theology of the faith tradition of our childhood, the elements of the worship experiences of our youth remain powerful for invoking a sense of worship in us throughout our life.
I was reminded of Martin Marty’s words a few years ago. In a class I was leading, we were drawing the places of worship of our childhood and I found myself trying to capture the quality of the light of the small, wood frame church of my childhood. The windows were plain glass and I used to watch the dust motes flow in the strong light coming in through the windows on Sunday mornings and think about being in a holy place. With this memory, this recollection, I understood immediately why I had never liked stained glass windows in a church. At the same time I understood why people who had grown up in churches with stained glass might find them a lovely part of church design.
Therein lies one of the challenges for us as Unitarian Universalists with our worship. How do we accommodate the range of religious backgrounds and particular practices that may be powerful for some of us and almost anathema for others? How do we experience the variety in our worship services that some desire and maintain enough familiarity and order that worshippers feel the sense of safety necessary for the kind of honest self-examination that leads to transformation?
A character in a novel I read several years ago says at the end of the story that living her life feels like walking a tightrope but that someday she hopes do a few pirouettes on her tightrope. This is an appealing image to me; partly because it captures how we feel about our lives sometimes. Partly because of the edge that’s part of it and I think it’s important to be willing to live at our growing edges. Mainly it appeals to me because of the playfulness; the idea that even when our lives feel like we’re walking a tightrope, we can still do pirouettes. That part of the image always makes me feel a lighting of my spirit.
I wonder if perhaps our Worship Committee has felt as though they were walking a tightrope some of the time. At one of their meetings which I attended, they discussed how to be responsive to and how to balance feedback from some of the members about the Greet Your Neighbor part of our worship service and the importance of this act of worship, theologically and liturgically, to our minister. They decided to keep Greet Your Neighbor but to change where it happens in the order of service to see if the new flow would be better for those who didn’t like it while at the same time honoring the importance of this act of worship. I don’t think they felt like they were performing a pirouette with this decision, but they were.
One Sunday this spring, we had a number of visitors and at the beginning of greet your neighbor, I think every one of these visitors said something moving about this church and/or Unitarian Universalism. One of our new members whom I happened to be sitting beside that morning was very moved by the testimonies of our visitors. She turned to me, glowing, and said, "Wasn’t that wonderful. This is such a wonderful church. I’m so glad I found it." As LaRoche says, you never know when the surprise insight is going to come to you, or from what part of our worship service.
The biggest challenge we face is not specific to Unitarian Universalists but is universal–the willingness to be fully engaged in our worship. In the Clinical Pastoral Education program I was in during my sabbatical, we began each morning with a 30-minute worship service, which we took turns leading. Despite our theological differences, we each found these worship services meaningful, thought-provoking, and renewing. We came to rely on the way they nourished us. One morning right away I found myself reacting so strongly to the theological viewpoint in a classmate’s presentation of the Biblical reading she had chosen, that I was unable to be in any kind of worshipful frame of mind or attitude. I was also angry at losing this valued morning worship, disappointed because I usually found this classmate’s worships particularly rich, and felt bad about the way I was feeling because it somehow didn’t seem fair to my classmate. In an effort not to spend the whole thirty minutes with this unpleasant mix of feelings, I decided to spend the time trying to figure out why I had such a strong reaction to her interpretation. It turned out to be one of my most significant worship experiences. Vogt’s language for what I did was the worship act of penitence–an honest self-examination and a renewed sense of call to the good. For me, the experience was one of connection and transformation. I connected with a deeper part of myself, gained new insight about myself and new clarity about my beliefs and felt a surprising kinship with this classmate.
The experience reminded me of the importance of our being willing to remain fully engaged in worship even when it is not meeting our expectations, even when it requires more effort than we had expected.
Consideration of things of greatest worth–this morning the thing of worth we have considered is worship itself. Sometimes we have worship experiences that are so important for us that we remember them for the rest of our lives and continue to draw strength and renewal from the memory of them. Sometimes we receive an unexpected gift of grace from worship; sometimes we have worked hard during the worship for the transformation we feel inside ourselves. Sometimes we may leave worship feeling that we were essentially disengaged the whole time, but even in those times we do not know what our presence may have meant to another.
Where two or three are gathered in worship, there is great power. May we in our worship together have ever new experiences of truth, goodness, and beauty; of hope, faith, and love; of connection and transformation. May we leave our worship with our spirits lightened and our commitment and our will to live out our deepest values renewed.