“Deep calls to deep in the thunder of your waterfalls;
all your breakers and waves have gone over me.
The Lord will grant his loving-kindness in the daytime;
through the night his song will be with me,
a prayer to the God of my life”. Ps 42
One might think that worship and reverence arise from believing, believing in a God who is worthy of worship. I think that it is the other way round, believing happens because we worship.
The word “orthodoxy” means both “right or correct opinion” but it also means “right or correct glory (or worship”.
One New Year’s Day, I was walking with a friend by a reservoir in the late afternoon. It was grey, cloudy, and the wind was whipping up the waters of the lake into small waves. In a moment of dramatic expression I threw up my arms into the air, and shouted into the wind, as I stood on the edge of the lake,
“Yours, Lord, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the splendour, and the majesty; for everything in heaven and on earth is yours…” 1 Chronicles 29
It was not a matter of knowing or believing, my words and actions were an uninhibited and involuntary response to being alive in that moment, a creature joining the whole creation in an exclamation of exhilaration, wonder and joy.
The American philosopher Susan Nieman adds a moral reflection to this notion of worship or reverence.
“For me, it’s not important how one envisions a creator or whether one envisions a creator at all. That we have a sense of gratitude for the world, and a realization that wherever the world came from, it was not us that made it—I think that those are two extremely important moral emotions that might be able to unite both secular and religious people”.
Our university chaplain put it this way:
“Religion for me is acknowledging an “I to Thou” relationship with the rest of the universe, all creatures, all things. Something I relate to as being part of, not an object I use. Subject to subject, not subject to object”.
Worship is an individual activity but it is also something that we do together, and our worship binds us together so that our words and actions work in concert, it becomes religious. (‘Religare’ means to bind). I want to suggest that religion begins in the shared set of non-rational affective responses to being alive, one of which is a sense of worship. Beliefs come later, when people seek to rationalise the experience of being religious.
I have an old photograph taken in Savernake forest during the early 1970’s, it pictures my father, my younger sister and me aged about three. It is a picture glowing with the late sun of a winter afternoon. Beech leaves, bronze brown, lie snow deep amid dark smooth barked trees. What the picture cannot show you is the wind that sang through the trees. Its song moved me. Still does. My parents remember me leaping up out of the pushchair throwing my arms up into the air, shouting, “The trees are singing!”
Were the trees really singing? I don’t know, but I did hear a song and joined in with both voice and body.
“Lift up your hands to the holy place / and bless the Lord”. Ps 134
The holy place is here, the song is all around us.
“O come, let us sing to the Lord; / let us heartily rejoice in the rock of our salvation…
“Come, let us worship and bow down / and kneel before the Lord our Maker”. Ps 95
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