“President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man – The Christ.” That's the title of a book that is pictured in a meme making its way around social media. While it might sound like some kind of satirical production, it is not.
I am curious as to why progressive Christians still use the word " worship" when it comes to liturgies and order of services? Isn't it an antiquated word too? I often use the words let us celebrate God's presence together. Your thoughts?
Dear Diane,
I am one of those who tries no longer to use the word worship to describe what it is we do when we gather. Sometimes, as you say, we celebrate. Yet sometimes we gather to mourn or question or simply wonder. Even the use of the word God, I believe, is problematic as it usually dualistically presupposes a being separate from Reality. Let me offer a different perspective.
Our work as a people, which is one way to describe liturgy, is the soul’s practice of becoming the truth of who and what we truly are. Soul is shorthand for describing how each creature is Being present in a particular place and time. Our ego is the soul contracted by defenses and desires to secure the love it needs to exist; the spontaneity and freedom that is Being is blocked and mostly unconscious. The awakening of our soul as Holy Mystery is learning to live spontaneously as presence, our true nature.
In communal liturgy, we gather to discover and deepen our awareness that there is no gap between us and Holy Mystery. Drawing upon Julian of Norwich we could say that grace and peace are always in in us – because they are us – but we do not always act from that love and peace. We become lost in our blindness (fear, anger, deceit, envy) to our own truth. We come to liturgy battered and bruised by our own inner critic (self-shaming, self-doubting, self-rejection), attachments, identities, societal prejudices – by the effects of human blindness. Liturgy is where we practice together and directly experience in our practice that in truth, we are love incarnate longing to live as such. In and through our practice together we are gradually being born into the freedom that is our true nature.
We gather to hear stories, sing songs, dance, receive teachings, anoint, and be fed. Each of these is a spiritual practice of presence. And this communal spiritual practice is itself grounded in a receptive listening flowing from the practice of meditation. Too much of formal communal liturgy is busy doing rather than relaxed being, more reflective of cultural anxiety than spiritual grounding and awareness.
Each authentic and sincere spiritual practice within liturgy flows from emptiness into embodiment such that it sparks curiosity, reignites the fire of soulful longing, and supports us in the gradual realization of Christ heart. The path of Jesus is the soul’s gradual awakening to the truth that she is fully alive and thriving, become a living Christ.
Liturgy is not so much the worship of a deity but our communal spiritual practice of realizing, as did Jesus, that to be an authentic human being is to be nothing other than the unique presence of Holy Mystery here and now.
~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
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