What do you say to people when you tell them where you go on Sunday mornings? Do you go to services? To the congregation? To the Sunday program? The meeting? To UUCC?? Do you slip out the door with a paper bag over your head? Do you call what we do worship? Franklin Grapel asked me this question: If this is a worship service, what do we worship and what does faith have to do with it?
What is this that we do on Sundays? Hmmmm. Speaking only for me, our community is not a social club, or a political club, or a place of entertainment. Sunday morning is not a meeting, or a lecture, or a performance, or a program because it consistently seeks to have a dimension that clubs and lectures and programs and meetings do not necessarily seek to have, namely a dimension of spirit. It is a time out of time which we give to the contemplation and experience of what is important, and even ultimate, in life. It is a time out of time, in which we allow ourselves to be open to one another and to ourselves and to that which is greater than us. I call this a Sunday service, but what does that mean? The word "service" is from the Old French and it means a celebration of public worship. What is worship?
These days, worship commonly refers to religious acts performed around a deity, and if that is how we understand the word, then what we do on Sundays is not worship.? Our services are not focused around a deity. Why not, you ask? Let me answer that question with another question: what deity would we agree to worship? In our UU tradition, we have the freedom to structure and discover our own beliefs. We do not have to subscribe to a particular belief in order to belong here. So what deity would we worship? We have different beliefs about deities, or none at all.
In some ways our freedom limits us. Since we don't have an agreed upon understanding or belief in a god, it's hard to reference that god in our services. A service leader cannot impose his/her own concept of god or assume, without explicit agreement, that everyone is on board if he/she only uses the word god to describe that which is greater than us. One has to allow for the many different concepts: god, no god, goddess, higher power, spirit, energy, laws of science, nature, etc. Our Sunday services ask you, the participants, to do the work of getting in touch with your beliefs, of getting in touch with your god, as you understand that word. A service leader sets the table, as best he/she can, for receptivity to intellectual, emotional and spiritual experiences. But the participants in a service have to get themselves to the table and eat.
In any case, we do not do worship in the common sense of the word. However, the? etymology, the history, of the word worship suggests that perhaps we do worship after all. UU minister Paul Beedle explains: "In old English (the noun) worship refers to that which is of value, "worthship." . . . It is the condition of being worthy. . . . The verb "worship" means "to shape worth." . . . To worship is to give useful, instructive shape to those often abstract values, to symbolize or articulate them in memorable and helpful ways." Thus the original meaning. The idea of reverence paid to a deity only appeared later, around 1300 BCE. (www.homepage.mac.com/paulbeedle)
So we say at the beginning of each service, "May we be reminded here of our highest aspirations and inspired to bring our gifts of love to all living beings." When we say those opening words together we are setting the stage for our worship. We are finding ways to articulate what we hold of the greatest worth and, having articulated it, allowing it to inspire us to action in the world. For we Unitarian Universalists are not only called to individual freedom of belief and conscience, we are also called to service: for one another and for our larger communities and for the greater good as we know it.
Is what we do on Sundays a worship service, then? No, in the commonly held meaning of the word, which is action revolving around a deity. Is what we do on Sundays a worship service? Yes, in the original meaning of the word worship. The noun worship means what is of worth. The verb to worship means to shape, to articulate what is of worth. Do we worship? Yes. What do we worship? We worship that which we value in the sense that we define it and shape it and let it shape us. Sunday morning is an opportunity for each of us to connect with what we hold of most worth in life, and having connected with it, aspire to living according to it. Whether one calls it worship or not.
What does faith have to do with this? Everything. What is faith? The dictionary says it is "confident belief or trust in a person, idea or thing. 2. Loyalty, allegiance. 3. Secure belief in God and the acceptance of God's will. 4. A religion." (American Heritage Dictionary) The English word faith comes from the Latin fides, which means loyal or trustworthy. The basic core of faith is trust and loyalty.
Does faith require "secure belief in God and acceptance of God's will," as the dictionary notes? I don't think so. Confident belief, trust and loyalty can reside in a person or an idea or a natural law as well as in a divine being. Although the commonly understood meaning of faith is belief in a deity, the word encompasses much more than that. Can an atheist have faith? Yes.
Nor does faith rest upon doctrine or dogma. If only you knew the "truth" you would believe. You can't will yourself to faith. Faith is not a commodity which you either have or you don't have. Faith is not a definition of reality, not a received answer. Faith is not a litmus test for moral goodness, or political correctness, for that matter. Faith is not blind belief.
The "essence (of faith) lies in trusting ourselves to discover the deepest truths on which we can rely. . . . (Faith is) the magnetic force of a bone-deep, lived understanding, one that draws us to realize our ideals, walk our talk, and act in accordance with what we know to be true." (Sharon Salzberg, Faith)
We realize our faith as we worship because worship acquaints us with the deepest assumptions, values and beliefs we hold about life. In worship we discover what we value. We can make these discoveries because of faith, because we trust ourselves to do it. No one is going to tell us the truth; no one is going to tell us what to believe. We have the wherewithal to discover it for ourselves. Then, once we have gotten in touch with our highest aspirations in worship, faith is the force of these aspirations to draw us to a particular way of life. You see, faith and worship exist within one another. They feed one another.
We may not want to use those traditional words, faith and worship, but let us at least understand what they might mean for UU's. Frank Zappa said, "Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence." Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it: "A person will worship something -- have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts -- but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming."
On Sunday mornings, our words, our sharing, our music, our silence, our children, our chalice lighting, our candles, our rituals, our laughter, our tears are all the means with which we worship and hope to get in touch with the deepest truths upon which we rely. We trust that we can do it and we leave ourselves open to be moved by those truths, and inspired to bring the gifts arising from them to all living beings. This is faith and worship.
And they exist, not only on Sunday, but all the time, in all places, for all of us. They exist as some kind of insight experienced, some kind of thought unbeckoned, some creative act, a perception, an intuition, an expression of compassion, a choice for justice. Faith and worship are ours for the invitation into our lives. May we take the time in our busy schedules, then, to worship, that is to discover the truths we hold most dear and upon which we rely, and may we take the time to recognize our faith, which is that trust in ourselves to remain open in spirit and mind and to heed the call of living in harmony with what is most worthy of our confidence and loyalty. May it be so.
Song #347? Gather the Spirit
Closing words adapted from Jacob Trapp and Ken Patton
Worship "is the window of the moment open to the sky of the eternal."? May we live with the windows of our beings open and "the full outstretching of our spirits."