Within all the religious traditions, worship plans a major part. Often worship is seen by many people as something people should do, or something that God requires of us. But is that true? Maybe worship is something that people do naturally. In fact, maybe worship is something that people long to do, that they long for the “living God”, and don’t realize it? There is a story within the Buddhist tradition that describes how a man had four wives. (click here if you wish to watch a video version of the parable). When he was about to die, he asked each of his wives to go with him to the afterlife. Three of them said no but his first wife, who had he neglected the most, said yes. In the story, the fourth wife symbolizes his physical body, the body he cherishes and decorates with nice clothes and jewelry, but the body can’t go with us to the afterlife. The third wife symbolizes all his possessions that he has gathered all his life, but they too can’t go with him to the afterlife. The second wife symbolizes his family, friends and relationships he has made but all they can do is attend his funeral and help him die; they can’t go with him to the afterlife. The first wife is his soul, the only part of him that goes with him to the afterlife but it is the part of the human being that is often the most neglected. This story helps us realize that our soul is the most important part of us, and yet, it is often the most neglected. Why is that? It is because that people worship wrongly. Instead of practicing worship that gives us life, we worship many other things thinking they will give us life. In fact, we become quite attached to these false gods we worship…which are the three wives in our story: our body, our possessions, and our relationships. Why is that? The Jewish and Christian scriptures teach that our human soul has a deep longing for God. Psalm 42 says it this way: “As a deer longs for streams of living water, my soul longs for you. I thirst for God, the living God.” For the past 13 years, I have been a student of the Diamond Approach, a sacred psychology. One of the insights I have appreciated from this approach to spirituality is what it calls the theory of holes. When we are born, we are already in touch with the sense of being, loved, wholeness and fully one with God and all reality. We have no longings. However, by the time we are in our teen years, many holes form in our soul for many reasons: imperfect holding environment at home, school and beyond, misunderstandings due to our child’s immature mind; even the experience of birth, a natural part of life, often leaves trauma. We experience these holes in our soul as longings, longings for what is missing. Longing for love when we feel unlovable. Longing for trust when we feel anxious. Longing for truth, understanding when we feel doubt or confusion. Longing for compassion when we experience being judged. Longing for strength when we feel weak. Longing for connection when we feel lonely. Longing for a sense of completeness when we sense there is something wrong or missing in our lives. Longing for joy when life feels heavy. Longing for freedom when we feel trapped or oppressed. The list of possible holes in our soul is endless. Each person has their own unique set of holes based on their history, mental and physical make-up. These holes create deep longings within us, longings that become the basis of worship. We go looking for a God, or many gods that can fill, transform, or take these longings away. Since we come to believe that these longing cannot be met from our personal internal soul, we look to the outside world to find what we are longing for. We tend to worship people who we judge beautiful because we feel that we are not beautiful in some way…we have a longing about beauty. We worship winners in sports. Why? Because we don’t feel like a winner inside. Instead, we often feel more like a loser. We worship those who are strong because we struggle inside with the hole of weakness. We worship wealth because we struggle with the sense of poorness or poverty inside. We idolize those who are smart because we feel that somehow we are dumb, that we have no knowledge to share. We love stylistic cars because they make us feel noticed, a sign that we long to be seen by others. We seek positions of power because we feel powerless, vulnerable inside. These are all examples of us looking for things or people outside ourselves to worship…symbolized by the three wives in the Buddhist story. I suspect this is reason why the first 2 commandments of the Ten Commandments within the Judeo-Christian tradition stress the importance of worshipping the right God. If you read Exodus 20 in the Bible where these Ten Commandments are first noted, the scriptures highlight how passionate or jealous God is around insisting that people worship the right God. Many times this notion of a jealous God is understood as God being very demanding of humans, essentially punishes people if they don’t worship him/her. This is often how the writers of the Old Testament understood suffering. If we suffer, it is because God has abandoned us, no longer loves us, no longer protects us, no longer provides us what we need to thrive and live fully in our world. This way of interpreting suffering means that our suffering is a sign of God punishing us, that God is causing all the suffering. However, when we look at this suffering using the Diamond Approach’s theory of holes, we soon realize that God is not causing any of this suffering. Rather, this suffering has its roots within us, within the way our mind thinks, within the way our heart feels, within the way we act, within the way we hold things in our body. Or the suffering has its roots within our culture, or our family system, or within the organization we find ourselves working for. This suffering tells us that there is something within us or our context that is interfering or distorting our relationship with God. When you see suffering in this way, you soon realize that our suffering is actually a profound form of longing for what is missing in our lives, whatever that is. When we suffer, we find ourselves resonating with the words we have already heard from the psalmist, “As a deer longs for streams of living water, my soul longs for you. I thirst for God, the living God.” Notice the words “living God.” We don’t thirst for any God. We don’t thirst for any God that can take away our longing momentarily, like a quick fix, maybe for a few hours or few days or a few months. No, we are looking for a living God, one that we can relate to and responds to the many holes we carry within soul and life. This is what true worship is all about, not stuffing holes with false gods that take away a longing for a period time, but rather a relationship to the Living God who is responsive to our longings, sufferings, and needs when they arise, a relationship with God that causes us to feel complete and loved, despite our holes. The key to worshiping this living God is developing a relationship with our soul, the first wife in the Buddhist story that is often neglected. There is the place within us we can develop a relationship with the Living God. What does this worship look like? When I was contemplating what Christian scripture captures the essence of true worship, the well-known scripture of Apostle Paul came to mind, from his letter to the Jesus followers of Philippi. Within this scripture, Paul quotes what Bible scholars believe to be a hymn from the very early Christian church, written before anything of the gospel, letters, and books found in the New Testament. In this text, Paul shares how the human Jesus became the Christ, the one who God lifted up and exalted. I have come to understand Jesus’ experience of being lifted up and exalted happening because the human Jesus sought the living God all the time, not just on the Sabbath but all the time. Worship was Jesus’ way of life. Seen in this way, what does this text teach us about worship? Apostle Paul invites us to take on this same worshipful attitude that was in the human Jesus. Rather then seeking to be God-like, that is, be the centre and controller of his human life, Jesus emptied himself, surrender himself. He worshiped the living God who was at the centre of his life and all of life. How? By becoming very human, embracing his humanness, embracing his vulnerability, embracing his nakedness before God…developing a vulnerable relationship with his soul. Jesus embraced his incompleteness as a human being by embracing his vulnerable soul, becoming totally dependent on God, even if embracing that vulnerability meant dying, even death on the cross. Have you ever considered that true worship involves an act of surrender, an emptying of our egoic self so that we can embrace our vulnerable soul? Consider your own experience of worship. When you come to your religious place anticipating worship, do you anticipate the experience of letting go, letting go of all your worries, pressures, expectations? Letting go and just settling, just being with yourself and your soul, with a whole bunch of people who are doing the same things, letting go and simply being with their soul, simply being. But what does it mean for us to truly surrender, to empty ourselves? Yes, I think it can mean letting go of all our worries, stresses, and pressures, but I think this letting go in worship has the potential to mean far more. So often, we come to worship with the goal of being our best, before God and our religious friends. We put smiles on our faces. We share with God all the things we are thankful for. We come to worship to praise God. But, if we are not careful, all of these expectations around worship can cause us to present ourselves as shiny pails where we have our life all together perfectly. But is that true worship? This may surprise some of you but I don’t see the goal of worship as about praising God. Praising God happens, but it is not the goal of worship. Rather the goal of worship is something else actually. It is about self emptying, becoming vulnerable and real, and surrendering ourselves to God. Rather than revealing our “shiny bucket” in worship, we reveal our “leaking buckets”. We reveal our holes in our soul in worship. This is what self emptying actually means. It means letting go, as best we can, of our attachments, all the different ways we fill or manage the holes in our life to keep ourselves from feeling our sufferings and longings. Many of these life strategies, that help us deal with life, actually interfere with our ability to experience the spirit of God. They keep us from developing a deep caring relationship with our soul. They keep us from entering deeply into worship. When we empty ourselves, we truly feel and embody our humanity…as Jesus did. It often does not feel comfortable for us to discover again our incompleteness, the parts we often coverup, the parts without God in our life. In fact, sometimes this self emptying can feel quite scary. I suspect this scary vulnerable side of worship is why most people actually resist entering too deeply into worship. It means giving up their control on their life. This is the human side of worship, the part that we are responsible for in worship: the letting go, the surrendering, the embracing of our full human soul, as best we can. But there is another side to worship, isn’t there? The side in which God enters the picture… After Jesus expressed worship through self-emptying himself throughout his life, even if it meant death, Apostle Paul claims, God entered Jesus life and lifted him up. “God highly honored him and gave him a name above all names, so that at the name of Jesus everyone in heaven, on earth, and under the earth might bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God.”
Worship is not only a time when we surrender ourselves to God, and experience all our longings for the living God, but it is often a time when we experience God responding to us and ministering to our deep longings. A person loaded down with guilt comes to worship hoping for forgiveness. As they confess and surrender their pain, their act of self-emptying, they experience a profound sense of gracious love wash over them and find themselves lifted up and totally embraced by God. And they find themselves praising and thanking God for what has happened. A person feeling very lonely and isolated comes to congregational worship…which is actually a very scary thing for them to do for being with people creates lots of anxiety. They come hoping to feel some sense of God’s presence, that God has not forgotten them. As they sit with their loneliness in worship, and their longing for God’s presence, they feel a warmness begin to rise in their heart area of their body. The warmth gets stronger and warmer and she soon realizes that God is with them right now. After worship, someone reaches out to themr, says hi to them, and asks about their life, and they realize through that human contact that they are not alone as they thought they were. They leave church that day lifted up and so thankful. I am sure each of you have your own worship stories, where you shared your longings with God, waited, and God’s spirit, in some way, responded and ministered to your longings, and as a result your found your heart praising and thanking God. That is the process of worship, as I have come to understand it. It involves 4 parts:
Questions to Ponder: 1. Ponder the Buddhist story of the four wives. How does it connect to your life story? 2. What are the longings you bring to worship? How have you filled these longings in other ways in the outside world rather than bring them to worship? 3. How have you experienced God’s ministering spirit as you surrendered to God/True Nature in worship? 4. How did your soul respond when this divine ministry happened in worship?
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